


state of grace

by dragonsinparis



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Identity Reveal, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, adopting weird monsters for fun and profit, angst and yearning on parade, do they count as poor life choices if you're already dead, story is not an endorsement of dimensional portals and/or bringing your friends back from the dead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 13:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6197422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsinparis/pseuds/dragonsinparis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Chat Noir is fatally wounded, Ladybug uses her Lucky Charm to open a portal to the underworld in order to go drag her partner back to the land of the living...even if his ghost is tagging along, telling her that this is a terrible idea. </p><p>He may not be entirely wrong about that.</p><p>As the two make their way across a Parisian purgatory they are faced with how little they know about the origin of their powers, the nature of their enemy, and the limitations of their hearts. They’ll have to face brutal truths about all three if they ever want to make it home - </p><p>But none of it will prepare them for the true price of resurrection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. violent delights & violent ends

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just _wait_ a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, _you_ , you twat, open your eyes, wake up! _Don’t die_ this time!' But they always do.”

― **Elizabeth Wein, _Code Name Verity_**

 

Adrien pretty much had two choices: he could blame Chloé, or he could blame Shakespeare.

They were both pretty solidly at fault for the current akuma situation, but he figured he should probably give old Willy S. a break, what with the man having been dead for a few hundred years. There was kind of a point where you stopped being able to control how people interpreted what you wrote, and normally that point was after you published it, but once you were _dead_ , any control of anything kinda went out the window.

(Adrien would remember that thought later and wince at the irony.)

Chloé, on the other hand, was just being Chloé. And he’d like to say that was as far as it went, but it wasn’t the first time she’d been responsible for someone getting akumized and the odds that it was the last time were low. Although at this point almost everyone in their class had fallen victim to an akuma at one point or another, and Adrien wasn’t even sure Hawkmoth’s power extended to repeats. Maybe she would just cycle through everyone in her sphere of influence and be unable to wreak any more havoc.

Then again, it wasn’t like Chloé hadn’t managed to akumize random people she had just met. Sometimes the weirdest thing about not being homeschooled anymore was how everyone in his class reacted to her: objectively he knew she was kind of a pain in the ass, and now that he went to school she wasn’t his only option where friends were concerned, but it still sort of surprised him when anyone took anything she said seriously. Getting mad at Chloé for being self-involved and ridiculous was like getting mad at a fish for being wet.  

Honestly, he would have been more surprised if she hadn’t jumped on the line. “A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet?” The dumb petty joke practically wrote itself. He almost wished that Chloé had at least found a different way to piss Rose off - the desire to pun in a less catty (irony again!) way was strong, but would probably only make things worse. Well, worse than usual.

Worse than now.

Now, he thought absently, was pretty bad. Although admittedly it wasn’t all that much worse than normal.

As akuma went, Rose’s wasn’t actually that dramatic, insofar as she wasn’t turning the whole goddamn city upside down. While some akuma had a specific target, most of them were inclined to attack pretty much anyone they could find in the meantime. But Rose clearly couldn’t go anywhere paved - she’d grown roots, among other things - and while that meant that the park in front of the school was kind of a mess and had some interesting new holes in it, her admittedly enthusiastic destruction was at least contained to a very limited area. Even if her mystical controllable angry angry rosebushes were upsettingly spry and could scuttle pretty much anywhere.

None of which made it any less his job to deal with. 

The class had fled indoors but they were now all pressed up against the windows, watching it unfold in between the vines that had crawled up the walls outside like it was the castle in Sleeping Beauty. The frequency of akuma attacks at this point meant that people were so used to weird monsters that some measure of the scare factor was just gone, and it had turned into the city’s most ridiculous spectator sport. Besides - as proved by Alya, right up in the front with her phone out as always - everyone was hoping Ladybug and Chat Noir would show up.

Which would have made for a great distraction so that he could sneak out of the classroom and transform if he hadn’t slammed straight into Marinette Dupain-Cheng as he was trying to get out the door.

“Oh god,” he stammered, as they both half-fell into the hallway outside the classroom, “I’m sorry!” He could practically feel his eyes bugging out. “Seriously, I’m so sorry! I just needed to go get, um,” oh, crap, what would make leaving the classroom during a monster attack actually worth it? “My history homework!” _Great lie, Adrien. Kudos. She’ll never suspect a thing_.

Maybe it was the monster attack, but Marinette seemed panicked enough herself to not notice how totally weak his excuse was. Then again, Marinette said a lot of weird stuff as a general rule - especially to him, for whatever reason - so maybe it didn’t seem too far out there to her. He found it kind of endearing if a little off-putting, normally, but if it was gonna help him get out of this without arousing suspicion it was gonna be his new favorite quality in anybody. Especially in Marinette.

“ME TOO!” She exclaimed, too loudly. She seemed to catch herself, and tried again. “I mean, not my history. My physics. Which I know we already had today but I got one of the problems wrong so I have to fix it. With a thing. That is in my locker. Which is this way.” She bolted straight into the girl’s bathroom.

Okay. Totally inexplicable. But hey: the hallway was now empty.

“Plagg, claws out!”

 

* * *

 

It began like this:

“Here’s the question that I want you all to ponder as we read the play that we’re beginning for this unit: were Romeo and Juliet really in love?” 

Adrien heard a sputtering of disbelief behind him and knew without turning that it was Rose. Nobody in the class cared about old-school romantic mythos the way she did. “Of _course_ they were in love!”

Miss Bustier fixed her with a pointedly inquisitive stare. “Oh? Are you sure? Based on what evidence?”

Rose stood her ground. “Everybody knows. It’s one of the greatest romances ever written. They _died_ for love.”

Miss Bustier didn’t seem swayed. “That’s certainly one popular point of view. But you could also argue that they died for passion, that all they felt for each other was infatuation. This is the kind of story where the reputation of the work and the content of the work itself are vastly different creatures. Romeo was your age; Juliet was even younger, barely thirteen. They only met a handful of times, over the course of a few days. The entire play takes place over the course of less than a week. They fell in love at first sight - but if you’re just falling in love with how someone looks, is that real love?”

All of this was delivered in a relatively gentle voice - Adrien wasn’t sure Miss Bustier had it in her to be anything but, even when correcting them - but it was easy to tell that Rose was still taking it very poorly. He was privately pretty sure that she’d never actually read the play but built the idea of a great romantic tragedy up in her mind, and was not prepared to have it potentially crumble.

Which would be just another day in literature class if he wasn’t also pretty sure he was in love with a girl whose name he didn’t actually know, so this whole speech wasn’t just getting under Rose’s skin.

He put his hand up, which he could tell kind of threw the teacher for a loop. Adrien wasn’t the most active of participants in Literature class, as a general rule. She called on him regardless.

“But if we’re putting that kind of limit on love, exactly how well and how long do you have to know someone for it to count as love? Like, if the story had taken place over the course of a month, would it be love then, even if nothing else was changed? How well and for how long do you have to know someone before you can love them, rather than just be infatuated?” 

To his surprise, Miss Bustier smiled. “And that’s why I’m not telling you either answer is actually wrong - as long as you can back it up. These days, people tend to assume this is either one of the greatest love stories of all time or a tale about two moonstruck silly children who threw their lives away with little to no reason. But the truth is somewhere in between, and will likely be different for each of you based on your own perception of love.”

Adrien wasn’t sure why that made him feel even more uncomfortable, until he was walking out of class at the end of the period and started to think about his own perception of love. The truth was that his perception of love was virtually nonexistent.

His mom had been gone for years. By far the worst part of having a parent who just up and vanished was that you wound up stuck hoping that they never loved you at all. Because if they didn’t love you, maybe they left of their own volition. Maybe they were happy somewhere, without you. And god did he ever resent that idea, but it was better than imagining someone who loved you suffering or dead. Someone who clung to the idea of you while trapped in a basement somewhere, bleeding, while you worried about your goddamn homework. Someone whose thoughts were of you as they breathed their last, while you brushed your teeth and wondered what was on TV that night.

And then there was his dad, who if he was lucky he saw in person twice a week, and who he might have seen smile directly at him a month or two back. (It was at a photoshoot for a vest that had come out particularly well. Adrien hated himself for remembering the specifics: exactly how far away his father had been, exactly how many seconds it had lasted, exactly which side of his mouth actually tilted up and exactly how far. He hated how much each of those specifics mattered to him.) Gabriel had hugged him once recently - right after Jackady - but the moment had been so utterly surreal that it had felt like it belonged to someone else. That it some alternate dimension there was a Gabriel Agreste who cared, and the two had gotten switched for thirty seconds for no discernable reason.

His feelings about the hug were something he couldn’t sort out on their own terms, but were made all the more complicated when he couldn’t even think about the incident without panicking about his father’s reaction to his ring.

And, of course, there was Ladybug. And _god_ did he love her, but there was so much of herself that she was unwilling to share...and, he had to admit, so much of himself that he wasn’t sure about. She’d met him as Adrien, but she only really _knew_ Chat Noir. He loved the freedom the mask gave him, but he wasn’t sure that freedom meant honesty; he couldn’t be positive that he wasn’t just using Chat Noir as an excuse to make up a better version of himself, a version he just wished he could be.  

What if they _had_ met in real life? She’d hadn’t recognized him as her partner when faced with his civilian identity. What if that went both ways?

Forget a romance that only lasted three days: could you say you loved someone you’d known for _months_ if you couldn’t recognize them without a bit of fabric over their cheeks and forehead? 

Somewhere through the fog of his addled brain there was Chloé’s voice, making fun of the play and its two central characters to Sabrina and anyone else who would listen to her. And this would haunt him later: that he didn’t even know what she said, aside from that dumb pun that he could have made better. That he didn’t bother to listen. That he was so tangled up in his own thoughts that even though he could tell Chloé was making it personal, targeting Rose - by the way the small girl shrank back, the way Juleka frowned, the way Marinette was stepping forward - he ducked his head and walked past.

Marinette. He didn’t know where that girl got her energy; she always seemed to run everywhere, always seemed to be involved, always seemed to step up and always seemed to be able to handle whatever was thrown at her. Nothing slowed her down: from unexpectedly starring in Nino’s movie to designing Jagged Stone’s cover to winning his dad’s fashion competition to doing most of the evil-fighting work when Nathanaël’s akuma had wanted to date her, she’d just powered through. She’d worked hard for all of those victories, but she never seemed to have to work to stand up for her friends. For any reason. It was something she was good at. It was something Nino was good at. It was something he...was working on. 

Chloé was his first friend. When his mother had left and his father had become all the more distant, before he’d gotten to come to a real school, Chloé had been literally the only person who would have whole conversations with him, even if any conversation with Chloé tended to be one-sided. They were even conversations that were mostly about Chloé herself, which meant they weren’t awkward and painful conversations that circled the subject of his mother, vulture-like, but never quite touched on her. He wasn’t sure whether his mother was the suffering creature that the birds had their eye on, or he was. Without a confirmed kill, all they did was cast shadows that reminded you how fragile you were. 

He knew Chloé could be mean. That didn’t make fighting with her feel less like a betrayal.

Marinette had it covered. Marinette always had it covered. Today was just a bad day, and the subject was a sore one.

Tomorrow, he told himself. I’ll stand up to her tomorrow.

 

* * *

 

Chat Noir sometimes worried about the fact that nearly every akuma was ridiculously more powerful than they were.

Like, Stormy Weather had thrown lightening and created tornadoes and could fly for no discernable reason and otherwise totally ignore the laws of physics. Timebreaker had been able to freaking _time travel_. Pharaoh had turned people into mummies and opened up a gate to the underworld. Hell, if Ladybug hadn’t stopped him, maybe Pharaoh could have even brought back the dead after all.  The Dark Knight or whatever had made an army of mind-controlled slaves. And almost none of them seemed to have any weakness or limitation, beyond the token that gave them their power - and it wasn’t as if he and Ladybug weren’t reliant on tokens, too.

So that was the big difference, in the end: He could destroy one thing, she could create one thing, and beyond that they were on their own aside from a stick and a yoyo. She could clean up the mess afterward, but she had to live that long. 

He did not, which was a fact never far from the forefront of his mind.

He figured it should probably bother him, but for the most part it didn’t. In any given war there were more dangerous missions. He defended her, so she could heal the city. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a great fighter - he was convinced that the martial arts and parkour skills that accompanied both the miraculous and the akumas came more naturally to her than to any of them - it was simply that, even aside from how he felt about her, she had to be the last one standing.

(The fact that were their positions reversed - if she’d been the destroyer and he’d been the healer - he’d have acted the exact same way he did now was something he was grateful to be able to ignore. It wasn’t the case. He had a perfectly valid excuse. It didn’t matter that he was a giant freaking hypocrite.)

Rose’s akuma appeared to be named Blackthorn. He knew he’d heard the term before, but he wasn’t sure whether it was because Blackthorn was a real plant or because it just happened to appear in a bunch of fairy tales. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that while Rose now looked more like that tree from _Guardians of the Galaxy_ than she did herself, the small pink bracelet that the girl always wore was still intact, right there on her wrist. Or branch. Or whatever.

Cats climbed trees. This would be a cinch, right?

(So trees weren’t generally violent. _Details_.)

“The akuma’s in the bracelet,” Ladybug announced, landing softly beside him. It was embarrassing, how much lighter his chest felt at the sound of her voice. It wasn’t that he was afraid to fight an akuma without her - although he wasn’t sure what he’d do with the butterfly at the end if he did - but he felt incomplete. That feeling was lessoned whenever he was fighting an enemy that wasn’t an akuma and didn’t _technically_ need her, but only a little. It was like missing his left arm, rather than his torso.  

“I’m quite re- _leaved_ to see you, my Lady,” he said. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t _turnip_.”

She groaned, and it was so familiar and so beautiful. “You’ve been waiting for a plant akuma for a while, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure where that observation _stems_ from.”

“Chat, we have a monster to fight.” 

“Indeed, _lettuce_ do battle!” She rolled her eyes but he was sure she smiled, just the tiniest bit, before turning to leap at Blackthorn.

Who caught her by a giant branch (arm?) and promptly hurled her high and far, sending Ladybug careening through the sky at least three blocks away. He could see her pull out her yo-yo, but Blackthorn had followed up her Ladybug-toss by throwing three of the demon rosebushes after her, and one managed a direct mid-air hit.

Well, so much for his metaphorical torso.

He went for a slightly less direct approach. He now had Blackthorn’s full attention, which was not very convenient, but he also kind of specialized in distraction so it wasn’t too inconvenient either. They didn’t often get to sneak up on an akuma; his acrobatic skills might not quite match Ladybug’s but they were more than a match for any plant. ...well, now that Ladybug had unintentionally taught him what to avoid. Aside from the obvious, which was that instead of fingers Blackthorn had sharp, gleaming thorns, wide as his staff and nearly a foot long.

He was going to have to get past them to get to the bracelet, however.

If it weren’t for Ladybug’s aerial exit, pursued by a shrubbery, she’d be Lucky Charm-ing right about then and he’d just have to worry about following the orders that had always lead them home free. But she wasn’t, so he’d have to go with improv.

He raced forward, initially charging straight for Blackthorn but sliding beneath the branches that tried the same sweep on him that had worked on Ladybug. He raced up the trunk, dodging Blackthorn’s attacks, using the dense branches near the top as a shield. The akuma’s hundreds of appendages worked both for and against her - and both for and against him.

Which left him at an impasse, sitting on an akuma’s head. She couldn’t get at him, but he couldn’t get at the bracelet. And the amount of time he had before she figured out a way to get at him anyway was doubtlessly incredibly limited.

And so down he went, sliding this time, using the momentum of Blackthorn’s ‘arms’ to build a speed she couldn’t match or block. She attempted to counter by turning, hurling the hand of the arm he was on toward the sky in what he was sure they both knew would be a successful attempt to throw him off -

\- but even as he started sliding skyward, he managed to snag the bracelet as he flew past what passed for her hand. It slid off so easily that it almost seemed silly. He had one glowing moment as his body shifted in the sky and he started to fall, clutching the bracelet, chest warm with success and the knowledge that in a moment the girl he loved and respected more than anyone would return and he’d be able to hand her exactly what she wanted, and any danger would be -

\- his body finally rotated enough for him to see where he was falling, and Blackthorn was smiling through her twiggy teeth, and that would-be hand with its brutal thorns was still outstretched, and he knew he was about to be skewered and there was nothing he could do.

He’d always thought that time was supposed to slow in moments like this. It didn’t, but he was shocked at how much he took in in that fraction of a second:

The bright sunlight. The crisp air against his face. The kids in the window, screaming. They’d figured out what was about to happen - he realized in fact that he hadn’t heard the scream start, that it had probably begun before _he_ even knew what was about to happen. Nino was probably screaming, not even knowing that the boy he was about to watch die was his best friend, that Paris’s hero owed him so very much. Alya was probably filming. Probably screaming, too - it was no secret that she favored Ladybug but her posts about him had been nothing but respectful and affectionate. He wondered what she’d say on the blog when his body was unmasked. Marinette was probably back from the girl’s bathroom by now, probably watching, possibly screaming too, although for whatever reason it didn’t seem like something she would do even in a moment like this. He’d told himself that he would stand with her the next time she faced down Chloé, but she was going to have to keep standing alone. He was breaking a promise she’d never know he’d made. The guilt was overwhelming, and he wasn’t even sure why he was so fixated on that at this of all moments: Marinette, standing alone.

Ladybug was going to have to stand alone now too, which would have knocked the breath from his lungs if the thorn had not, inevitably, impaled him through the abdomen.

The screaming stopped like it had been slammed back into Pandora’s Box. Everything stopped. All Chat Noir could hear was his own ragged, wet breath. His heartbeat was pumping in his ears, but seemed to be getting further and further away.

In stories, whenever the hero was fatally stabbed, he or she insisted that there was very little pain. This, Chat discovered, was a load of fictional bullshit. He could feel that part of his spine was gone, that his intestines were getting splinters against Blackthorn’s wooden hands as his blood ran down the great tree’s body. It wasn’t until he watched that river of red that he knew he couldn’t afford to lose crawling between the cracks of the bark’s rough surface that he even remembered the akuma was there at all, beyond being an instrument of his own death. 

The bracelet.

Blackthorn was reaching for it, watching him. And if she got it back, Ladybug would have to fight her for it. And what happened to him could happen to her. It wasn’t that he didn’t have faith that his Lady could succeed where he’d failed, could triumph where he’d fallen, but...he also knew she cared. That if she had to crawl over his dead body to get to Blackthorn she’d be compromised. He could keep her safe, one last time. 

His arms felt like overcooked pasta but he strained down to the shredded remains of his core and pulled and pulled and he didn’t remember it breaking in his hands, but there was a little black butterfly and suddenly he was falling, poor unconscious Rose beneath him. He reached out with both hands and trapped the butterfly between them, hoping it would last past his landing, that Ladybug could finish the job. He’d never expected to live through being Chat Noir, not really. It had never bothered him. Being a hero had been worth it. But he’d always thought she’d be there in the end. 

He didn’t feel himself hit the ground.

 

* * *

 

Which turned out to be appropriate enough, because he didn’t feel the ground when he sat up.

His whole body tingled, like every limb and everything in between was asleep, but that was vastly preferable to being stabbed through the abdomen by a thorn the size of a baton. It had to have only been seconds since he’d landed; Rose was still unconscious next to him, and the streets were still empty.

 _Miraculous Ladybug_ , he thought in relief. His partner had saved his dumb butt, once again. Where was she?

...the destruction was still everywhere else. Rose was still covered in his blood. Why had it only worked on him...?

Where _was_ Ladybug?

He looked down at himself and froze. He suddenly had four feet. Four legs. Two torsos, one in far better shape than the other…

He swallowed and looked at the ground behind him.

There was his body, looking anything but peaceful and not even the smallest bit like any of his nine lives were left. _Oh god oh god oh god_. He rolled away in a panic and found himself in the fountain, _not getting wet_ , because _oh god he had no physical form_. He was a ghost. His _dead body_ was _right there_ and he was a _ghost_ and _god_ it looked _awful_ his _guts_ were no longer all _inside him_ and -

He had to get away. He stumbled right through the stone to the other side of the fountain - it was big enough to hide the body from view completely - and fought for air, even though some part of him knew he wasn’t even really breathing. He tried not to vomit, even though he knew there wasn’t anything in the stomach he didn’t even have anymore. Was this a panic attack? Could you have a panic attack when you were dead? Was -

“Jeez, those stupid bushes _sucked_ ,” Ladybug said, lovely and whole and _alive_ and landing right in front of him. “What did I miss?”

_Shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my dear Kris/therentyoupay, for acting as beta and also for pulling me down into the nightmare abyss that is this adorable show.
> 
> Ten points to Ravenclaw for all you nerds who caught the Shakespearean stage direction joke during the akuma fight. I know that Shakespeare isn't really a big thing in the French school curriculum, but I'm rolling with it thematically. 
> 
> 'violent delights & violent ends' is another R&J reference, which is extra ridiculous because as far as Shakespeare's plays go it's not even one of my favorites. It just works with the story, and academia related to it is crawling around in my real life. 
> 
> Come hang out with me on my garbage tumblr @ http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/


	2. when the lights go out & the sun burns down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always knew this chapter was just going to be one scene so I assumed it would be shorter and yet here we are with 5k+ of angst, all aboard the train of misery and poor life choices, choo choooooooo
> 
> Once again, this was beta'd by the flawless Kris, to whom I owe eternal gratitude but also some poor life choices.
> 
> The art in this chapter was created for the story by thunderpot @ tumblr, DO NOT REPOST IT

“And no cheating, Lady." he said.

"But who could cheat Fate?" she asked.

He shrugged. "No-one. Yet everyone tries.”

― **Terry Pratchett** , **_The Color of Magic_ **

 

“Uh...” he said eloquently.

“I feel like you should be bragging a lot more right now,” she said, with a slight smile. “Looks like you took the akuma down without my help. Where’s the butterfly?”

He could only stare at her. She was beautiful, and she was smiling, and he was never going to know her real name. He was never going to touch her again; he was never going to see her without the mask. He’d treasured each minute he had with her but standing here now, he felt like he’d taken every single one of them for granted. They were over and they hadn’t been anything close to enough.

Something horrible must have been written all over his face because her mask scrunched, like her eyebrows were drawing together. “Chat, what’s wrong? Did the butterfly get away?”

“No!” he managed. His voice sounded strained. He wished he was a better liar. “No, I’ve got it trapped. It’ll...keep. For a while.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Her smile was back, if a little wry. “I didn’t get a chance to use my Lucky Charm, so I can’t actually fix this - I have to actually use the Lucky Charm against an akuma to turn it into the whole Miraculous Ladybug swarm - so we may get in a bit of trouble.”

A bit of trouble, he thought. It was a possibility.

He’d signed his own death warrant.

If he’d let go of the bracelet, if he’d accepted that she’d have to fight Blackthorn on her own, she’d have summoned the Lucky Charm, emerged victorious like she always did, and Miraculous Ladybug’d the whole thing away...including, presumably, his fatal wound. But he’d been dumb and overprotective and all he’d thought of was her, and it meant that he was never going to be there for her again.

She was smiling. “Don’t look so tragic, _chaton_ ,” she said. “I think this park was actually scheduled for demolition anyway. They wanted to redo it. They may give us a medal instead.”

Well, she was probably right about the medal part.

He tried to give her a smile. He was pretty sure he mostly looked like he was being strangled. Under normal circumstances he was so very good about being everything he wanted to be when he was wearing the mask. Now it felt like a cheap costume, although he suspected that was due in no small part to the fact that since his Miraculous was lying on the other side of the fountain on the finger of his dead body, it really was just a costume. ...which lead to the question of why he was still Chat Noir, rather than Adrien, as a ghost. ( _oh god he was a_ **_ghost_** _._ ) Was Plagg still in the ring?

...did Plagg know he had died? Could the little cat feel it as it happened, or was the transformation an act of blind trust? No matter how much Plagg gave him grief, he knew the kwami loved him. He wasn’t sure which result to hope for; he didn’t know which would be harder to bear. Besides, either way, Plagg would have to find out alone. There was nobody else who knew to tell him.

Chat was already going to have to tell Ladybug.

As Adrien, he was shy. There were standards to be met and judgements from people around him and he’d always been so wary to challenge any of them. As Chat he was responsible for people’s safety, their very lives, but he’d never felt restricted by anyone’s expectations but his own. Plagg had offered him the chance to be a hero and he’d never hesitated. It wasn’t that he didn’t take it seriously, it was just that it had always been something that was entirely his, that he was doing for himself and his own reasons. That and the mask made confidence easy in a way it never had been for Adrien.

Maybe it was the lack of a real miraculous, but he’d never felt so utterly Adrien in her presence, even when he’d actually _been_ Adrien.

And she could tell something was wrong, he could see it on her face. It was remarkable how easily you could read someone who was wearing a mask, once you’d gotten to know them well enough. And she knew him: even if so much of their relationship was stolen moments between akuma and muggers and goons, or lurking high above Paris bracing for battles they never instigated, they’d learned every inch of one another not covered by a costume. She’d known something was off from the moment she’d landed in front of him...she just hadn’t figured out what it _was_ yet.    

And part of him knew, _knew_ that every moment he put off telling her was a mistake...and he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.

She opened her mouth to ask, and he interrupted before she’d had the chance to get a word out. “I thought that since we didn’t use our powers and aren’t on a time crunch, now would be a good time to talk.”

She looked like he’d told her now would be a good time to go salsa dancing with an anthropomorphic lizard. “You thought what?”

“That we could talk. Just for a few minutes.”

“Yeah, no.”

“Please?”

“We can talk later.”

“Or we could talk now.”

“Or we could not talk at _all._ ” It was a warning; she was losing patience.

“Well it’s not like you have a choice,” he pointed out, nerves humming, “since I haven’t told you where the akuma is.”

The playfulness vanished from her face. “Are you seriously coercing me into talking to you? Using the fate of the city?”

“Apparently.” He was dimly aware that the hyper _hey I’m dead what do I care?_ vibe that he was currently riding high on was not him but rather just condensed shock and panic and could not last, but hey. He was dead. What did he care?

She was clearly pissed off, but also clearly kind of stuck. “Okay, Chat. What did you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to thank you.” He was winging this, but he couldn’t regret his opener. This was his last chance. At least he was getting a shot at saying it, which was more than anyone else got, as far as he knew. “For this. Being Chat Noir has been the best part of my life and you were always the best part of being Chat Noir.”

Her face told him that she was thrown for a loop and couldn’t decide if he was serious - she’d expected more silly quips and come-ons, and she couldn’t reconcile the blackmail with his sudden utter, dramatic sincerity. He almost regretted all the flirting over the course of their partnership, but he was also contented with it; he’d made sure she knew how he felt from the beginning, even if she didn’t believe it. She’d be able to look back and know. He’d given her at least that much.

“Chat...” she began.

He wasn’t sure if what lay under her tone was reproach or rejection, but he knew he couldn’t let her get it out. He wasn’t even sure how much time he had; he didn’t really feel any different than he had when he’d awoken, but he couldn’t imagine - didn’t _want_ to imagine - that he had forever. Especially if he could never touch anything. Could never touch _her_. He wanted her to be alive and happy and he was so relieved that she was, but the idea of following her around forever like some kind of ghost-cat was unbearable. She would grow up and he wouldn’t. She would keep fighting and he couldn’t help. She’d likely fall in love and get married, sooner or later, and nothing killed the mood at a wedding like the ghost of a fifteen-year-old dead boy in love with the bride who was pining from between the flower arrangements.

“I know you think it’s because I love you and I do but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Wow, she even _winced_ at the word love. It was barely there, but it was definitely the instinctual reaction of someone who didn’t want to hear it, who couldn’t reciprocate his feelings and had been doing her best to ignore them and hope they’d go away. He was surprised that that could still hurt, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret his feelings or his confession. It was almost funny how easy it was to tell her how much he really cared. He closed his eyes against the burn and kept going. “I guess it is, but not like that. I love you, but I also _love_ you. I don’t...have a lot of people I can count on. But I’ve always been able to count on you, and I just...wanted to make sure you knew what that meant. That someone as incredible as you, as brave and strong and funny and kind and _good_ as you, had my back. Always. And today...reminded me that I needed you to know that.”

This time when she said his name it was gentle, even grateful. He opened his eyes again, furious with himself for ever closing them when he knew how limited his window for staring at her was. Her beauty had always been so subjective to him that he was almost surprised to realize that she really was beautiful by any standard, that any quality either of them might have had even existed outside the bubble he’d placed them in ever since she knocked him out of the sky that first morning.

It was such a silly thing, but he was so glad to have met her in the sunlight.

She was not crying but her eyes shone like she almost could. Every time he saw them he was shocked anew at how blue they were, how wide. She was so much closer than he’d realized, their faces inches apart, her expression wide and hesitant and vulnerable.

“My Lady,” he whispered. He was helpless in the ocean of blue that was her eyes; whatever had seemed so awful also seemed very far away. Nothing was dark or brutal or hopeless when they were this close, and he wasn’t the only one moving closer.

 

From behind the fountain, Rose screamed.

Ladybug jumped; the moment shattered. She began frantically looking around - for another akuma attack, he realized. It had taken him a moment to fall back into the real world, to remember what Rose was doubtlessly screaming about.

_Oh no. Oh no, no no...._

“I don’t see anything,” Ladybug said to him, her voice fierce and her eyes everywhere. Back to business, just like that. Part of him regretted the opportunity lost ( _what opportunity?_ His brain whispered. _What were you gonna do, ghost-boy? Kiss her? With what?_ ) but part of him was glad. That he could see the side of her he’d first fallen in love with, before whatever side of her he knew he was about to see when she followed Rose’s screams.

“There’s no akuma,” he said. “She’s not hurt. But I have to tell you something.” He could prepare her, at least. She didn’t have to learn about it by racing to a fight only to find his body.

She turned back to him. He could tell by her face that she’d realized immediately that his previous speech hadn’t been the real reason that he hadn’t told her where the butterfly was; that even if he’d meant every word it had been a ruse, pulled over something he hadn’t wanted her to know. Her eyes were dark with frustration. “What didn’t you - ”

He winced at the accusation in her tone. “No, it’s not like that, I just - ”

“ _Oh my God_ ,” Rose screamed, “ _he’s dead, he’s dead!_ ”

Ladybug’s frustration melted into horror, her mouth opening under the shock. “Somebody died?” She whispered. “ _Somebody died and you didn’t tell me_?”

“It’s not what you think!”

“ _You didn’t want to tell me because somebody died and you knew I couldn’t fix it and -_ ” she looked like she couldn’t decide between being furious with him and bursting into tears. Her words were panicked and shaking and blurring together. “And this is _my fault_ , if I hadn’t been careless I would have been here, and how could you break the akuma without me, knowing someone had died? How will any of Paris trust _either_ of us after this?” A pause, a deep shaky breath. “Oh god. _Who was it_? Was it someone from _this school_?”

She must have seen the answer to her last question on his face because she put her own face in her hands. “Oh god. Oh god.”

“Ladybug, I - ”

She held up a hand to silence him, raised her head, straightened her shoulders. “I need to go over there. I need to...I can’t just run away from this. I need to see for myself, see if there’s anything I can...do. I’m responsible.”

“Please don’t blame yourself for this,” he whispered.

“I blame Hawkmoth too. I do. But I should have - ”

Now he did interrupt, as firmly as he could manage with terror crawling up his spine, trying to strangle his tongue. “It was my fault. It was all my fault. If I hadn’t been an idiot, you could have fixed this. But I was, so this is on me.”

She was clearly as loathe to let him carry that weight as he was to let her. “Chat, it’s not - ”

“It is,” he said, surprised at how normal his voice sounded. “You know it is, I think. But I need you not to go over there. Let...let me do it. You can read about it in the paper tomorrow. Or on the internet.” He wasn’t entirely sure whether he was trying to make sure she could learn about it in private, or whether he just couldn’t stand the idea of seeing her face when she saw his body.

“I need to know who it was,” she said quietly.

He wanted more than anything to put a hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

He hadn’t been thinking about anything other than getting her away, but he knew the instant the words had left his lips that it was the wrong thing to say. Fury rippled through her.

“It _doesn’t matter_?” She hissed. “It _doesn’t matter_ who got killed because _we_ weren’t good enough?”

“That’s not what I meant!” He said. He realized he sounded guilty and frantic, and he was, but mostly he was scared. He had painted himself into a corner now, and had to either let her get even more angry at him or tell her the truth. Which she would inevitably find out, in minutes if not in seconds. _And yet_. “I, I just think - knowing who it is won’t change anything - it’s just - I mean it sucks pretty equally whoever it is, so - ”

“Listen, _Chat_ , this is on _both of us_ and we are going to _take responsibility_ for what happened. We owe this person, whoever they were, that much.” She was advancing on him and he was backing up. He wanted to look anywhere but her angry eyes but he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away. “You’re flippant and ridiculous at times but you’ve never been heartless or a coward so I want to know what the hell has you acting like a pathetic, self-involved assho- ”

She went to poke him in the chest for emphasis and he realized what she was doing an instant too late. Her hand sank into his insubstantial form, her finger where his heart should have been.

The whole world seemed to sink into that one point between them, and freeze.

He hadn’t realized he was going through the motions of breathing - even if it wasn’t real air - until that moment came and he was too afraid to move his chest. The world seemed to vibrate in silence as she stared at where her hand had gone inside of him. He could tell that there was a sliver of time where she understood that he was only a shadow but hadn’t quite connected the dots between his incorporeal body and what Rose was screaming about on the other side of the fountain.

Then she did, and her expression and the world trembled and reformed into ice: utterly still and so very, very cold.

She did not cry. The confusion on her face fell away into no expression at all.

He hung on that silence for as long as he could bear. It felt like hours. It was probably seconds.

“ _My Lady_ ,” he tried, before realizing he had no idea how to continue. What could he possibly say?

Her unblinking gaze rose from the hand still inside his chest up to his eyes, but still she said nothing. She seemed to see him and not see him, all at once.

“I’m so sorry,” he said softly.

She shuddered and finally pulled her hand away, closing her eyes. “It’s you,” she whispered.

What was there now, but to admit to it? It was only an admission but it felt like a confession. “Yes.” A beat. “I failed you.”

She kept her eyes closed, breathed deeply: in, out. “Where’s the butterfly?”

Her question nearly knocked him sideways, dread and guilt and blindness rolling in his gut. _Of course_. All that time trying to keep her from ever having to see his body, and the akuma that only she could cleanse was trapped between his two dead hands. He was such an idiot.

“It’s in my - ” He started to hold out his hands, to mime the motion of capturing it, but her eyes were still closed. “...I’m...holding it,” he finished lamely, his voice raw with apology.

She nodded once, tightly, and turned away from him to walk to the other side of the fountain. His mind raced for a way - a reason - to stop her, but came up empty. There was nothing he could do but let her endure this. He followed.

Rose was having hysterics over the body, blocking their view of the face. He’d thought his body was on its back when he’d sat up as a ghost but he’d fallen facing downward, and the mistake had come from - he winced - the fact that the wound had gone all the way through. And, presumably, from the fact that he’d spent as little time looking at it as possible.

His hands were trapped under his body. Someone was going to have to turn it over. ...Ladybug was going to have to turn it over, and purify the akuma, and take his Miraculous away. That bothered him almost more than being dead. The reasons didn’t really make sense, especially given his current state, but there it was: as long as the ring was on his finger, Adrien Agreste and Chat Noir were the same person. Once it was gone, he wasn’t sure what would be left.

“Please move,” Ladybug said to Rose, flat and even.

Poor Rose. She was going to carry so much guilt for this, he knew. This was the girl who’d tried to give a hand up to Timebreaker, mid-battle. She couldn’t even let akuma suffer; that she’d feel responsible for his death wasn’t even a question, even though he was sure she was less guilty than...well, than Adrien. Adrien, who’d known she was getting verbally abused by Chloé, and had walked past in silence.  

Chat wondered, in a distant sort of way, if he’d be alive if he’d just done a little more to discourage Chloé’s bullying. Her behavior had always slid off of him so easily, but then again, he’d never actually been a target of her cruelty. She’d always seemed so lonely to him, every bitter word stemming from a profound misunderstanding of how to connect to the people around her, but when did his kindness stop being kindness and start being irresponsible? In this form, he was rooted in stopping injustice, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell a blonde in a yellow jacket to do her own physics homework, or that she was being an asshole. And now he was dead because of it.

He couldn’t hate her. But would he feel differently if it was Ladybug lying there, instead of himself?

Part of him wanted to believe that it was the suit - that as Adrien he was weak but as Chat he was noble and strong. But it wasn’t a lie he could have faith in, even in his own mind. He couldn’t absolve himself of responsibility in either form.  And most of the time, he didn’t even want to. He didn’t dismiss the side of him that was Adrien just because Adrien had needed Chat Noir to save him. He knew better than anyone that sometimes good people needed saving. Chat Noir wasn’t a separate identity, he was a tool that Adrien had crafted on his own terms to escape everything that kept him trapped. In his darkest, most uncertain and lonely moments as Adrien he could remind himself that he’d been chosen for a reason, and even if he didn’t see real value in himself there must be something down there in his heart, shining bright. And maybe he’d failed where Chloé was concerned, but in the end he’d still gotten himself killed because he was trying to do the right thing.

None of which made it easier when Rose crawled a few feet away and Ladybug’s legs collapsed beneath her at the sight of his face. His left cheek rested against the dirt; his eyes were wide open.

His favorite part of the transformation had always been the two-toned green eyes. He didn’t get too many chances to look in mirrors as Chat Noir, but it had always been the element that let him feel like he wasn’t just Adrien Agreste in magical black matte vinyl. But while the miraculous had held the suit and mask in place, the eyes had reverted to normal. He felt almost robbed, almost offended. Ladybug reached out to touch the body’s arm but flinched back before she made contact. She swallowed, tried again, and plucked helplessly, gently at the armor on his shoulder as she pressed her lips together.

Chat turned away.

Rose was still only a few feet off, and still crying. The girl was going to need so much therapy.

“Rose,” he said softly. “Rose, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do this.” He knew she’d mourn regardless, but he didn’t want her to feel responsible. All these people around him were blaming themselves for his mistakes.

He’d spoken quietly, but she still should have heard him.

“Rose? Rose!”

Nothing.

“She can’t see me,” he said, his voice half wonder and half fear.

“The Miraculous is probably the only reason I can,” came Ladybug’s voice behind him, still empty and monotone. He turned. She’d gotten his body turned over onto its back; a white flutter rose from her yo-yo. “Bye-bye, little butterfly,” she said. Usually the phrase sounded like hope.

Now it sounded like the goodbye that it was.  

The students were starting to pour out of the building; he could hear them, even if he didn’t take his eyes off of Ladybug. He realized he’d forgotten them. They were very unimportant next to the question of what was going to happen next.

Ladybug seemed unconcerned by either issue, choosing instead to sit back down next to his body. She flicked the bell, gently; she ran her fingers through his hair. She hesitated, but then ran a hand down his face, closing his eyes. A shiver ran through her, but she seemed not to notice it.

He sat down next to her, as close as he could get without her being in any danger of any would-be-but-wouldn’t contact.

Alya got there first. He wasn’t surprised. She walked right through his elbow, which was a little weird, but it was hard to get mad at someone who couldn’t see you and appeared to be freaking out on your behalf but also looking anywhere but your body.

“Oh,” she said to Ladybug. “Oh no, Ladybug, I’m _so sorry_ , I was hoping it wasn’t as bad as it looked from the school, I’m _so sorry_ \- ”

Ladybug didn’t glance her way and Alya seemed to be at a loss. For once, there were no questions, no angling for a scoop: the Ladyblog had taught Alya that she wanted to be a journalist, but she’d set it up first and foremost as an ode to her idol. And there was no denying that that was Ladybug, but it was almost humbling, almost sweet, to see her all tangled up in the fact that she cared about him, too.

He felt guilty for being glad she was sad about it, especially since he knew that once he was unmasked it would probably get a whole lot worse. But knowing he’d been valued was something he’d take where he could get it.

“He was really brave,” Alya tried, quietly.

Nothing.

Nino was right there behind her, trying to pull her away, wincing at the blood. That made him jump up, reach out. “ _Nino_!” But of course the other boy couldn’t hear him.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Alya said. Chat wanted to kiss her, even though he knew Ladybug wouldn’t believe her for a moment.

Ladybug slowly looked up at her. She narrowed her eyes, too, but Chat could tell it wasn’t in anger. Ladybug was thinking, turning what Alya had said over and over in her head. “That’s what _I_ said,” he couldn’t help interjecting. “Or, at least the part where it’s not your fault. Which is basically the same thing. You should listen to her. And me.”

Ladybug stood up. Chat was pretty sure it had nothing to do with listening to him.

“ _Lucky Charm_.”

Definitely not.

A small gem landed in her hand. He had no idea what on earth it could be for, but that wasn’t exactly unusual. She didn’t seem sure, either, which was a little more strange. She considered it, rolling it between her forefinger and her thumb, before gripping it firmly in her fist.

Then she walked a few feet away, picked up a blanket that some picnickers had abandoned when the akuma had arrived, and draped in gently over his body. She pulled it up to make sure his face was covered...and then she pulled out his hand, and took off his ring.

A green glow came from beneath the blanket. What little of the costume was still visible vanished. Alya made a strangled noise from behind them. He imagined it wasn’t easy to face getting what you’d always wanted all wrapped up in a nightmare. Then again, Ladybug had made sure to cover his face, so she hadn’t gotten it yet.

And a tiny black kwami flew out of the ring.

“You must be Plagg,” Ladybug said, still somewhere between firm and toneless. Chat distantly remembered a conversation in the past about their kwamis, but he wasn’t sure what she thought Plagg would be able to do for her beyond maybe taking his ring to whoever would hold it next. He found himself resenting someone he’d never meet, someone who would inherit both his mantle and his partner. He hadn’t finished with either one.

Plagg clearly was not interested in formalities - or, for that matter, in Ladybug. His eyes went straight to Chat, and every part of his tiny body drooped. “Oh kid,” he said. “What did you _do_?”

“There was an akuma.” It was the worst possible time for a dumb joke. And yet: it was Plagg, and god, did he need something familiar. “I claw-st.”

Normally that would earn him a glare from both of them. This time it sank like a lead balloon. He’d somehow made everything worse, but he wasn’t sure what he could possibly have said that would have a better effect.

“Do you know what this is?” Ladybug said, turning away from him, holding the gem up in front of Plagg. The kwami went rigid.

“That...is not something you wanna use, Red.”

“What is it? How would I use it anyway?”

Plagg was silent.

“I let you out to help me,” Ladybug snapped at him, and Chat was almost relieved at how much raw emotion was suddenly back in her voice. “You think I care at all about keeping your Miraculous safe? I don’t. Not now. Not anymore. You can help me or not, but I’ll figure it out.”

Plagg stared at her, with all the petulant neutrality he could muster. But then the kwami glanced at Chat, and Chat could see it was a mistake. That behind the bluster and gripeing, the dumb little cat had loved him, and Plagg had always been inclined to serve his own ends.

“It’s a night-stone,” he said. “It’s a bit like a Miraculous, I suppose, but tied to a function rather than a person. You break it and you get a portal to the underworld. And _your_ kwami would tell you that it’s something you shouldn’t be touching, much less using, and that the underworld is a terrible place to be, and death is death and shouldn’t be messed with, and you might just destroy the entire Miraculous legacy in addition to leaving Paris undefended, and also the odds of you coming back alive are basically the same as the odds of you going to the moon, and the odds of you finding a way to fix this are even less.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “But _you_ won’t tell me that.”

“Cats are selfish.”

She looked at the blanket, sadly. “He never was. Not ever.”

Which of course was a big steaming pile of crap, he thought, but his heart swelled within him at the sentiment.

“You want a superhero, you gotta balance out the cat a _little_ bit,” said Plagg.

“Excuse me,” Chat said, “do I get a vote? Because I vote this is a _terrible_ idea.”

“Then you don’t get a vote,” Ladybug said, without even glancing at him. She turned to Alya and Nino. “You two. I don’t want anyone lifting that blanket. I know you want to know who we are, but I’m bringing him back and he had _better_ still have his secret when I do.” They looked at least a little confused - anything she was saying to him didn’t make sense to anyone who couldn’t see him, after all - but Nino nodded vigorously, and after a moment Alya did too.  

“I don’t want you dying for me.” His voice cracked. Before this happened, he’d have given anything to know she cared so much. Now he wished he could trade it away to keep her safe.

She looked at him and half-smiled. It was that look she got when the pieces clicked into place and she knew exactly how to use whatever tool the magic had given her. And a part of him was terrified, but he was still a cat, and cats are slaves to instinct: that smile had always meant victory for them. That smile had never, ever let him down. “Oh, I don’t plan on dying.”

“Then don’t _do_ this,” he said, desperately. “You have a family, I know you do. _You_ have a future. You don’t owe me this.”

It was the wrong thing to say, again.

She threw the stone against the ground. It cracked. A wisp of smoke escaped, and then a vortex spread from its center, whirlpooling deep into the earth, shimmering like an oil spill.

And then she smiled at him, a real full smile, the grin of triumph and affection that had always been just his. They might have protected this world but their own had only ever had a population of two.

“Try and stop me, _chaton_ ,” she said.

She jumped through the portal and he was left with no choice but to do as he’d always done: jump after her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm probably gonna stick to shorter chapters from here on out (if I can) just because it makes me more likely to update with any kind of regularity. These were the only two chapters where I knew exactly where they began and exactly where they ended. The rest is just...stuff will happen, but is not as firmly divided. Whatever. What truly matters is that I got a Rose akuma in right under the wire. Really, Rose? Princess Fragrance? I guess I can't blame you for the name but I can hella blame you for the fucking weird singing thing. 
> 
> The rule about the Lucky Charm only creating the swarm after being used on an akuma is something I made up, but the only time we see her use it at any other time is against the Bubbler to produce a record, and the record did not become a swarm, and...I needed to keep him dead, because otherwise the fic would be over far more quickly than intended. 
> 
> The chapter title is from Ingrid Michaelson's song “One Night Town.”
> 
> I love Terry Pratchett, but to be honest I'm not wild about Color of Magic, despite using that particular quote. Hit me up on tumblr (http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/) if you wanna know which of his books I'd recommend. Or if you just want to talk about this goddamn French kid's show which has eaten my goddamn life.
> 
> reminder that the art in this chapter was created for the story by thunderpot @ tumblr, AND YOU SHOULD NOT REPOST IT


	3. specter in a strange land

“You’re never more alive than in battle.”

 **“** Never more dead after,” I say.

 **“** Ah, philosophy,” he smiles. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

 **―** **Patrick Ness** , _**Monsters of Men** _

 

Chat woke up feeling weird and displaced, which he hoped was not becoming a pattern because it had not worked out tremendously well last time, and the darkness behind his eyelids did not leave him tremendously optimistic about this one.

 _What kind of habits were you hoping to cultivate, ghost-boy?_ his brain whispered snidely. _What is it you want to spend eternity doing over and over, exactly?_

Normally his inner voice - or at least whatever part of it was rooted in doubt - sounded suspiciously like Plagg. Not exactly encouraging, but not entirely a dick. Apparently dying made it inclined to turn actively nasty. It was probably the shock, or whatever. There wasn’t exactly a lot of research on the psychological fallout of being a ghost, but he still vastly preferred -

Plagg.

Chat’s eyes snapped open.

He was lying on his back with his kwami comfortably curled up on his stomach looking, Chat thought, way too okay with the entire situation.

“You know,” Plagg remarked, “I kinda had my doubts based on the pictures, but you actually pull the suit off okay.”

“Where’s Ladybug?”

“I don’t know. This isn’t exactly a science, kid. She’s somewhere on this plane of existence, since I’m pretty sure we’re in the right place - or at least the intended one - but the odds of you coming through together were not that great without a physical link. And it isn’t like you two could hold hands.”

“How can we find her?”

“It’ll probably be as simple as following our ears,” Plagg said, looking a good deal less concerned about it than, in Chat’s opinion, he had any real right to. “After all, in case you hadn’t noticed, there isn’t anyone else around to make much by way of noise.”

It was not until that point that it even occurred to Chat Noir to look at his surroundings beyond the noticeable absence of Ladybug. 

The only thing he’d picked up before that was the fact that it was night. General darkness was inherently difficult to miss. Even without his night vision, though, he didn’t have any trouble seeing. He doubted Ladybug would either. It was strange to think of the underworld as having a particularly bright moon, or even a moon at all, but he admittedly never thought about what it _would_ have.

What it did have, apparently, was a Paris.

It was not the Paris he’d grown up in, of course, but it was unmistakeable.

It was also completely alien.

Part of this was doubtlessly because it was in ruins. He couldn’t tell if the mess that the buildings had become was because something had destroyed them, or simply because time always ultimately defeated innovation. Everything was crushed and broken, brutalized and worn and rusted and fragmented.

But more than anything, it was alien because it was empty. He had spent plenty of time in Paris feeling isolated, but that had always been entirely based on being kept apart from the millions of people who filled the city. He’d felt alone, but Paris had never felt barren. Even when he’d been in the Eiffel Tower with Ladybug at three in the morning, the city was humming beneath them, half asleep but vibrating with the life it contained. And no matter how much he loved the girl beside him, he loved the city, too. Its call wasn’t rooted in her, and he could recognize it regardless.

This Paris felt as if it was devoid of life entirely, and it wasn’t as if his presence was going to change that. He wasn’t even sure if or where Plagg might count on the dead/alive spectrum. And as much as he hated the idea of being there all alone, he kind of hoped that this world had taken one look at Ladybug and spat her right back out into the bright real world where she belonged.

“Do you think maybe she didn’t get through?” He asked Plagg hopefully.

“No,” the kwami said, flat and unsympathetic as ever.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m here, idiot, so my Miraculous is bound to be here too. Jeez, your observational skills suck. Not that that’s news, or anything, but still.”

Chat gave him the dirtiest look he could muster over the rising panic. “You know, I bet Ladybug’s kwami is really supportive,” he said. “And helpful. And not a total jerk when everything is already awful.”

“Oh, sure, Tikki is supportive. Manipulative as hell, but supportive. Tikki is like...remember that movie you watched last week where the guy who clearly got set on fire and hit in the face with a frying pan was trying to take over the world so the super old dude traveled to the underworld and tried to use child sacrifice to stop him?”

Trying to figure out what Plagg meant based on plot description was always a lost cause. The kwami loved movies but didn’t really have the attention span for them, and was often inclined to pull out the wrong details. So it was pretty much down to whatever he had watched last week, which meant…

“ _Harry Potter_?”

“Yeah. Tikki’s the old dude with the child sacrifice. You’re lucky that Ladybug didn’t take off her earrings and ask Tikki because to her, you’re mostly valuable because you keep the Bug on the straight and narrow, and because getting her to work as well with someone new after what happened to you would be a pain in the ass.”

Which was pretty much the last thing Chat wanted to think about. “I can’t believe you think that’s the plot of _Harry Potter_.”

“Look, kid, I was around during the Children’s Crusade. _That_ was messed up. Panface and Superbeard is a rollicking comedy in my book.”

“So if you’ve been through so much awful stuff, how come you didn’t tell Ladybug to just suck it up? Why did you let her come down here? You’ve probably been through hundreds of Chat Noirs by now.” God, he hadn’t meant to ask. It just popped out. He couldn’t bring himself to actually look at the kwami, which was new. Usually it was Plagg who was pointedly not looking at _him_. He couldn’t really sort out what he even wanted the answer to be: the idea of Plagg being miserable was like a stomach full of stones, but the idea of himself being yet another interchangeable pawn in a long line of them wasn’t much better.

The kwami was silent a long time. Chat was racking his brain for some way to dismiss the whole thing when the little cat finally did speak up.

“Wow, your observational skills really _do_ suck.”

“Yeah, you said that already,” Chat muttered at the ground.

Plagg sighed. It was always a kind of funny sound; the kwami didn’t really need to breathe and there was so little air in his tiny body that the sound shouldn’t have been that noticeable, but Plagg had a gift for the melodramatic. “Look, kid, I dunno what kind of weird delusions you’re under - I’m gonna go ahead and blame the Panface movie - but this isn’t exactly a common opportunity for me. It’s not like when Chat dies - which doesn’t always happen before Ladybug, for the record - Ladybug immediately turns to weird dark magic. Sometimes she accepts it. Sometimes she just doesn’t think of it. Sometimes she thinks of it later, when he’s already buried and worm-food, and either carries the guilt around forever or in one deeply unpleasant case sticks us with a very unfortunate zombie situation.”

Okay, that was worth potentially freaking out about. “ _Am I gonna be a zombie_?”

“Nah. We’re in purgatory, and time works differently here. Hours or even days down here is gonna be minutes up there. Which basically means either you’ll rot like you’re supposed to if she fails or you’ll come back before rigor mortis even starts to set in on the very, very off chance that she doesn’t.”

“...couldn’t I still be a zombie? I mean...” He swallowed. “I - I mean, my body - wasn’t exactly in fantastic shape.”

“I imagine that if there’s some magical hoo-haa that can restore life, a little invasive surgery comes with the package. ”

Chat eyed him. “...you don’t actually think this will work, do you?”

“Not really.”

Well, Plagg had never been one to mince words or lie for the sake of his chosen’s feelings. “Then why - ”

“For the same reason that I was going to share before you got sidetracked by worrying about becoming a zombie: just because I don’t get the opportunity to do this with each of my Chosen doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take it when I do. Hundreds of you doesn’t make it _easier_.”

Chat felt slightly gratified, and then felt guilty for feeling gratified. “Thanks.”

“If this does work, you owe me so much cheese. I expect to never have to stop eating cheese. I expect to be provided enough cheese that I can be eating cheese during all waking moments, forever.”

Chat realized he was actually smiling. It was kind of funny that he could feel it - his cheeks, his almost-chapped lips - despite the fact that he couldn’t feel anything else. “Done. Can we find Ladybug now?”

“It’s not like either of us have anything better to do. Unless you brought cheese?”

“I mean, there’s probably cheese in dead Adrien’s bag, back in the real world,” Chat said, trying to pick a direction, his mind already back on Ladybug. “I, however, do not have any intangible ghost cheese to offer you.”

Plagg shrugged. “Had to try. Besides, in case you didn’t notice from me lying on you when you woke up down here, tangible and intangible are pretty neutral terms to kwami.”

“I still don’t have any ghost cheese for you.”

“Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing you don’t need me to sustain your transformation.”

Chat glanced back at the little black cat, before scaling the first two stories of a fallen building in the square, trying to get a better viewpoint. He balanced carefully on a treacherous ledge he wasn’t sure he could really feel under his feet, hoping to catch sight of a flash of red. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Ladybug could handle herself in this weird empty world, but until he found her he was pretty sure he was gonna keep feeling like he’d somehow managed to swallow a fork whole. Still, the question lingered: “Why...is that, exactly?”

“Because you’re dead,” Plagg said, in his best _duh_ voice.

Chat shook his head, still looking around. “I mean, why am I still Chat Noir? It’s not like I have the Miraculous anymore. Why isn’t my ghost Adrien?”

Plagg shrugged. “Presumably because you’d rather be Chat Noir. Spirits are all just manifestations of self-perception. You like yourself better as Chat, you wanna be Chat, you look like Chat. If you let yourself like Adrien a little more, maybe you’ll change back. Maybe you won’t. What am I, the Ghost Whisperer?”

“I can’t see Ladybug. Can you like sense her or something? Or sense her kwami?”

Plagg groaned. “You as Chat and you as Adrien have that in common, at least.”

“Can you?”

“Not really. If she was untransformed I’d be able to sense Tikki, but she’s not.”

That was weird. “It’s been a few minutes. She used Lucky Charm. Shouldn’t she have changed back by now?”

The kwami shook his head. “Remember what I was saying about time being different? She’s alive, so she’s rooted in that world, and so is the way that time actually applies to her. So she’ll de-transform eventually, but it won’t be for a while. Which is really for the best, since she’s a lot more durable as a superhero.”

Alarm bells started going off in his head. Well, extra alarm bells. It was funny how in the underworld there was this kind of low-key perpetual alarm bell thing going on, that just sometimes jumped into high-key. Like now. “Why would she need to be durable?”

“I mean, give the circumstances...”

“Plagg!”

“What do you want me to say? You’re in a weird post-apocalyptic jungle-gym-from-hell version of your hometown, and honestly you and Ladybug are both enough of a mess that I can’t imagine there won’t be at least some violence.”

“We’re not gonna fight each other!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said violence!” Chat cried. “If we’re alone, why would there be violence?

Plagg looked almost ill-at-ease. “Alone is...a strong word.”

“ _What_?”

“In my defense,” the kwami pointed out, “I never said we were alone. You _assumed_ we were alone, because you’re rooted in _not alone_ meaning _people_.”

“ _Oh that’s super helpful where’s Ladybug I need to find Ladybug none of this is helping!_ ”

“This is why I didn’t bring it up,” the cat snapped. “Because I knew you’d freak out. I need you to _not freak out_.”

“ _I think it’s a perfectly reasonable time to freak out!_ I need to find her, if there’s something hostile here I need to make sure she’s - ”

It was at this point that Chat realized, in some distant part of his mind, that the world around him was no longer silent. That somewhere behind him in the rubble there was a growl, the sound weaving itself in and out of rocks falling. He heard the sound of big chunks of the rubble - chunks that were definitely too large for anything people-sized to move - rumbling and scratching against the remaining asphalt of the street as they were easily pushed aside.

Chat whirled, and found himself facing what probably passed for the monster’s belly-button. The creature’s glowing eyes and razor-sharp teeth were at least another seven feet above his head, but somehow they seemed a lot closer.

“That,” said Plagg (and the damn kwami had the nerve to sound _irritated_ ), “is why I wanted you to _not freak out_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plagg is the worst to watch movies with, which will probably become increasingly clear. 
> 
> Chapter title is a riff off of "Stranger in a Strange Land."
> 
> This was once again beta'd by Kris/therentyoupay, who I actually visited last week in Boston and sleepily told most of the plot to in a Panera. She is a gem and a hero to the people. 
> 
> Like everyone else these days, I'm usually on tumblr: http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/


	4. fear, itself

“He lifted his eyes to the girl. She looked afraid. She always looked afraid, these days. The world was a scary place.

She said: "Take me with you."

He woke up.”

― **Maggie Stiefvater** , **_The Dream Thieves_ **

 

It was dark and he was dead and in a weird alternate dimension, and overall those things were _very stressful_ , and if Plagg wound up asking him later why he didn’t recognize the monster immediately, that was his story and he was sticking to it.

Also, the monster in question was trying to kill him, which in addition to being ironic was significantly distracting.

“HOW ARE THERE MONSTERS HERE BUT NO PEOPLE?” He yelled at Plagg, who - providing neither physical assistance nor Miraculous powers - was even less helpful than usual.

(And how the hell was he supposed to beat a giant monster with no powers and no partner?)

Plagg, for his part, looked like he was trying to decide whether he wanted popcorn or Milk Duds to go with the show. (Metaphorically, of course. What he actually wanted, Chat knew, was cheese. For a creature so easily bored, Plagg was remarkably consistent.) “Are you sure this is a question you want an answer to right now?”

“Why not?” Chat asked. He’d been ducking and weaving to avoid the monster’s claws, trying to come up with some kind of strategy for going on the offensive, when it occurred to him that he was insubstantial. Which of course pretty much negated _any_ ability to go on the offensive, but also meant he had a lot less to worry about in regard to defense. He paused and put his hands on his hips, turning back towards his kwami. “I mean, it’s not like this thing can - ”

**_WHAM._ **

One of the creature’s limbs (he couldn’t be sure which one) sent him flying - and, admittedly, screaming - into what had probably once been a wall with some measure of structural integrity.  So much for that theory.

The sensation of the wall crumbling around and on top of him was muted, but it was _there_ . He could feel it. Nothing was actually falling _through_ him. He might be lying on the cold hard ground but it was noticeably both cold and hard. He was, once again, at least some measure of physical entity.

“OW!” He yelled at Plagg, delighted.

“Whoopee,” the cat agreed with a yawn.

Chat used what had been the wall before he’d been thrown into it to gain some height, then leapt onto the monster’s shoulders. “Look! I’m standing on it!” The monster did not seem terrifically happy about the situation, but there was something lurking in Chat’s gut that might have almost been fun.

“A true hero,” observed Plagg.

“ _Hey_.” Chat said. “This is good! How could I possibly have beaten this thing - ” (‘this thing’ was currently wiggling and waving as much as it could, but didn’t have arms long enough to reach to where Chat was perched on its head) “ - if I couldn’t even touch it?”

“Do you have any particularly brilliant ideas for how you’ll beat it _now_?” Plagg asked, only a little bit snide.

“Um.”

Chat leapt off the monster and onto a rusty lamppost that he only trusted to hold his weight for about two minutes and thirty seconds, and looked back. It was at that point that he finally got a good look at the creature, and realized how utterly familiar it was.

He had, in fact, fought this monster before.

It wasn’t exactly the same - some of the features that had been particularly rooted in Mylène were missing, including the pin that had held the actual akuma - but there was no doubt in his mind: it was Horrificator.

“It’s an akuma!” He yelled to Plagg. “At least - I think it is?” He was sure Mylène hadn’t been hurt in the attack; he’d seen her in the classroom, by the window, before he’d even gone to fight Blackthorn. So how on earth (or wherever) could her akuma - which had been purified anyway - be here? Could it even be an akuma, if it wasn’t possessing a person? “Is there a way to beat an akuma if there...isn’t a cursed object? Or a person underneath?”

The lamppost, as predicted, gave out. Chat leapt to the ground before it hit, somersaulted under the swinging arm of the Horrificator, and dodged a spray of pink slime. He did not have fond memories of being stuck on the ceiling under a mountain of that goop. And without his Miraculous he wasn’t sure that his staff was anything other than a glorified baton, even if it could touch things. Another reason to find Ladybug as fast as possible: if he got slimed even once, he was likely out of the game until she found him.

 _If_ she found him. If she, too, wasn’t up against something that they’d only ever beaten together. Under normal circumstances he wouldn’t be too worried - she’d beaten plenty of monsters while he was more or less out of commission - but without an akuma he wasn’t sure how either of them would really end the fight. It wasn’t like they were the type of superheroes to generally beat their enemies into submission: the akuma got purified, and the street crime got trussed up and dumped in front of the police station. And even if her transformation wasn’t wearing off anytime soon, she’d already used her Lucky Charm, so her offensive strategies would be limited.

“How did you beat it last time?” Plagg asked, still apparently more or less neutral on the fact that there was a giant monster trying to kill him. _Again_ . (Could he _extra die_?)

“We...calmed it down?”

Horrificator had gotten larger in the face of fear. But when faced with people not afraid of it, or when soothed itself, it had shrunk. He and Ladybug had only ever bothered to make it small enough to grab its token and defeat it, but it occurred to him that that didn’t mean it couldn’t get any smaller.

So: _calm down a monster trying to kill you, which may or may not understand anything you’re saying, while remaining emotionally stable about the fact that you’re dead and lost in the underworld and the love of your life is missing and possibly also fighting some kind of monster_. No problem whatsoever.

Even as he focused on his breathing, trying to make sure he could get calm and stay calm, he noticed that the monster seemed smaller. Even if it was just a tiny bit.

He backed up, out of the monster’s range, but close enough that he clearly wasn’t running. “Hey,” he said, as soothingly as he could. “You know me. Sort of. You like me. I played those drums made out of trash cans.”

The monster growled at took another swipe. He dodged backwards, and somehow managed to dig up a charming grin. “Well I admit I’m a better _meow_ -sician on piano, but it wasn’t _that_ bad, was it?”

There was a bit of a pause, as the monster narrowed its three eyes (what was the point of having _three eyes_ unless they were actually positioned to give you a better view?), as if it was studying him, trying to sort out where it might have seen him before, and whether that impacted exactly how it should kill him.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve got any of Mylène in you. But she’s good. Even when she was, uh, scary, she was better than most people. I think maybe you’re not really so bad. I just intruded on your _purr-sonal_ space, and you’re not wild about it, and I totally get that, but it was nothing but an un- _fur_ -tunate mistake, and I’m happy to get out of your neighborhood if you’d be willing to stop trying to turn me into _cat_ -sup.”

He had never thought, really, that acting sauve and making dumb jokes while facing down hostile terrors was a skill set that would turn out to be genuinely helpful. At least not outside of keeping _himself_ calm while he paraded around, an entire galaxy past out of his depth. And yet: it was clearly working. The Horrificator was still lumbering after him, growling and swiping...but the growl had become closer to a cranky grumble, and the swipe might send him flying but wasn’t going to turn him into chili. The akuma was barely taller than he was.

“ _Smeeeeelly wooooolf_ ,” he began to sing, skipping backwards, but the monster gave him a look that was almost _come on, seriously?_ And then he realized he couldn’t actually remember the rest of the words.

“Okay,” he said, climbing another pile of debris, doing a one-armed handstand at the top but keeping an eye on the akuma, who was way less inclined to approach him now that it didn’t have a size advantage. “So you’re not Mylène, exactly. But if you don’t mind my saying so, you do still remind me of her. The good way! And Horrificator is a horrible name. That wasn’t even a pun. I’m gonna call you Mellie.”

That seemed to confuse it more than anything else.

“What?” He asked. “You look like a Mellie! ...as much as you look like an anything.”

At the beginning of this enterprise, that wouldn’t have been true. It definitely looked like a Horrificator, fully grown. But now the thing didn’t seem scary at all. Its hostility seemed more or less proportional to its size. The smaller it got the less scary it was, and the faster it shrank. It was still chasing him around, sort of, but it seemed a lot less certain about what it wanted to do once it caught him.

“C’moooon, Meeeelllieee,” he sang, jumping back and forth over the fallen lamppost like it was some kind of skipping rope. Whatever was coming out of his mouth wasn’t anything with a melody, really, but singing had helped in the real world, with the real akuma. He couldn’t think of anything to do beyond acting as ridiculously nonthreatening as possible, so he kept singing. “Like meeeee, Meeeellliieeeee. I’m great, Melliieeeeee. This day has been a bit of a _cat_ -astrophe, Meeeelliiieeeee. I could really use a win, Melliieeeee.”

God, the thing was the size of a labrador and about as hostile. He finally stopped dodging and held a hand out. Mellie waddled over, delighted, and rubbed her head against it.  

“See, that wasn’t so bad,” said Plagg.

“And now I have a pet who’s way less of a dick,” retorted Chat.

“As long as you don’t feed it my camembert.”

“I bet Mellie doesn’t have that kind of bad taste,” Chat said, petting the akuma affectionately. “Do you, Mellie? I bet Mellie likes chocolate and baguettes and if she ever eats cheese it’s, like, brie or something. Something that barely smells at all.”

“Who would have thought a pink monster that feeds on fear would have such boring taste?”

“I feel like that’s not really the question that needs answering. Why is it here? Like, Mylène isn’t here, so why is her akuma?”

Plagg made a little _hrm_ sound, which was the noise he generally made when confronted with a giant problem he’d rather ignore. “Look at the moon,” he said, finally.

Chat knew where it was by the way the light fell. He couldn’t see it directly from the square; there was an almost-intact building blocking his view. He jogged past Mellie and turned to look up, and felt his chest tighten.

The moon above them shone violet.

It was a very familiar, unmistakable violet: the light that shone through the cracks on an akuma.

“Plagg,” he said softly. “What...”

The kwami floated over to sit on his shoulder. Mellie (growing again) wandered over and looked at the moon too, before looking up at him in confusion. She’d never known anything but that moon, he thought; she had no reason to see anything ominous about it. _He_ was the one who didn’t belong here; it was likely no more menacing to _her_ than the ragged landscape. The Sword of Damocles, after all, was only ever a threat to whoever sat on the throne.

“Hawkmoth is supposed to make champions, not monsters,” Plagg said quietly. “He’s found a way to taint anyone he offers power to with energy from this place. This is where akuma come from.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“It wouldn’t have changed your mission. Find Hawkmoth, stop Hawkmoth.”

Chat fought to keep himself calm. Mellie was back to the size of a small bear, and although it seemed like she’d decided that she more or less liked him, his fear was clearly agitating her. “This is bad.”

Plagg floated forward so he could turn and look Chat in the eye. “Worse than you know. For a lot of reasons. Miraculous users are chosen carefully because misusing the magic can have terrible, _terrible_ consequences.”

“Like Mellie.” He turned to the...he couldn’t bring to think of her as a monster, anymore, or even an akuma, though she was technically both. He settled on ‘creature.’ “No offense, Mellie.”

“Like _all of them_.”

Chat swallowed. “All of them?”

“All of them. Every akuma you’ve ever fought - and any others Hawkmoth may have created that you haven’t. They’re all down here, in their purest form. This is where the magic that consumes them comes from, and where it’s sent back to when Ladybug purifies it. But that magic retains the imprint, to an extent, of the person it possessed, and the emotion that drove it. The Horrificator showed up because you were afraid, which is why I told you _not to freak out_. Any negative emotion you have, if it’s strong enough, will draw the attention of any akuma who was driven by the same emotion. Fear. Or jealousy, or pride, or rejection, or...whatever.”

Chat thought of physics class, of the first law of thermodynamics: _the amount of energy in a system is constant, and though it can be transferred, it cannot be created or destroyed_. Part of what he’d loved about physics was the fact that even though his life was neck-deep in magic, science still made sense. Being Chat Noir was like having the cheat code to gravity, but it wasn’t as if there weren’t still obstacles and it was all the more fun to almost-fly if you knew what rules of the universe you were bending.

He forgot, so often, that those rules didn’t exist in a vacuum. He knew that Hawkmoth’s akuma were victims, so it was easy to convince himself that the darkness was just a temporary fluke imposed on them by a madman. That outside of their possession, it didn’t exist - within them, or anywhere else.

He’d been wrong on both counts, and it was deeply unsettling.

“We need to find Ladybug,” was all he could think to say.

He had to focus on that. He couldn’t let his fear take over. He couldn’t let _any_ of his feelings take over, apparently, because he might have won over Mellie but it wasn’t as if he and Ladybug had beaten any of the other akuma by _singing_ at them.  

“Agreed,” Plagg said. “So pick a direction.”

Chat bounced a little on the balls of his feet, eyeing each ominous direction with uncertainty. “Are you sure you can’t, like, sense my Miraculous? If she’s got it...”

Plagg hesitated, came to rest on his shoulder and closed his eyes. Chat wasn’t entirely sure that the kwami hadn’t just ignored the question and decided to take a nap there until Plagg opened his eyes again and gestured. “That way. Vaguely.”

“You can’t do better than ‘vaguely?’”

“A kwami isn’t a GPS, kid. I can sense _that way_. I can’t give you a mailing address.”

Well, it was a start. Chat began walking, keeping his eyes out and his ears open. Plagg stayed on his shoulder. Mellie trotted after him, which he hadn’t actually been sure that she’d do. Part of him suspected it was a bad idea - the odds of not being afraid again in purgatory were probably very low. If she turned back into a full-fledged monster, would she still like him? If she did, she might actually be useful if he ran into another akuma. On the other hand, if she didn’t, he might be totally screwed.

 _Ladybug will know what to do,_ he thought to himself.

But Ladybug had come here, and he was still positive that that had been a _terrible_ idea.

He didn’t want to think about it for a lot of reasons, but his traitorous brain kept dragging it back to the forefront of his mind like a cat bringing its owner a dead bird because it was under the impression he didn’t know how to hunt. Ladybug had come here, _for him_ . She might die, _for him_. He remembered the sound Alya had made, knowing she was going to learn his identity and horrified by it. He’d wanted more than anything to have proof of just how much his Lady cared, and now here it was, he was standing in a whole empty world of it, and all he wanted to do was make that same strangled scream again and again and again until his ghost throat gave out.

But he just kept walking, and stayed silent.

He could feel Plagg looking at him, but he avoided looking back. He looked at the ground, mostly; he paid enough attention to his peripheral vision that he’d notice movement or any flash of red, but he’d rather look at his feet than the crumbled ruin of Paris. The air was just cold enough to be uncomfortable, and he was glad to have the suit. He would have been glad to have it anyway; it was kind of like a security blanket. Even alone, he’d found, he fell into habits based on whether or not he was wearing the mask.

The most unsettling part of the empty city wasn’t that he felt so much safer as Chat - he always felt safer as Chat. Even when there was an akuma trying (or succeeding, apparently) to kill him, he felt safer as Chat. Chat was stronger. Chat was braver. Chat was dead, but so was Adrien.

The most unsettling thing was that even though he felt safer as Chat, deep in his gut he felt like he _should_ be Adrien. This cold empty city seemed _made_ for Adrien. If it weren’t for the akuma and the dust and the being dead, Chat was pretty sure his father would have stuck him down here on purpose if he could, just to keep him safe and out of the way.

At least if Gabriel Agreste had stuck _Adrien_ down here, Ladybug wouldn’t have followed.

Was he just imagining things, or did his glove ripple?

“Chat?”

He looked up and saw her, down the long boulevard, looking back at him - hesitant, clearly, her posture uncertain. And for the first time, when he fell back into his Chat persona, the reckless cheer actually felt like a mask. But she was here, she was here for _him_ , and her knowing how empty and awful he felt wouldn’t help. It hadn’t really sunk in yet, that he was dead. The anticipation was lurking, though. He knew it would come, that whatever fear had drawn the Horrificator to him would be nothing in the face of it when it finally hit.

Best to push it aside and pretend it didn’t exist for as long as possible before he inevitably broke. So he threw his arms wide, and sang. “ _HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIIIIIIIIIDEEE!_ ”

He was pretty sure he heard a quiet mutter of _oh my god_. But it worked; she straightened slightly, and walked towards him.

“ _I MUST HAVE CALLED A THOUSAND TIIIIIIIMES!_ ” He sang.

“Is that...Horrificator?” She asked, staring at the akuma as she got closer.

“It’s Mellie!” He announced. “But, yeah, it used to be Horrificator. Plagg says that this is where akuma kind of...come from.” He pointed at the moon. “Their essence, I guess? So, uh, bad news, if we feel the thing that created the akuma in the first place, it will kind of draw them to us.” He scratched the back of his neck with a self-conscious smile. “I may have freaked out a bit when I woke up and couldn’t find you, but Mellie and I are bros now. We just gotta make sure we keep our emotions...are you okay?”

Now that she was close, it was obvious she’d been crying. She’d pulled herself together - Ladybug always did - but she couldn’t hide the rim of red around her eyes. His heart plummeted into his abdomen. He wrestled down more horror - he’d never seen her so vulnerable.

“I’m fine,” she said shortly.

She was not fine.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I woke up and I was alone, just like you. I’ve been looking for you.”

 _Alone, just like you_. Except he hadn’t been alone for long. “Did you see an akuma?”

Every inch of her tensed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She’d clearly won - there wasn’t a physical mark on her, she wasn’t even breathing hard - but she also wasn’t going to volunteer any information.

The implication stung like a slap: she didn’t want him to know _which_ akuma had found her. Because if he knew which one it was, he’d know what she was feeling, what had made her cry...and she didn’t want him to.

Part of him was hurt. The other part was sure that whatever she was shielding him from would hurt more.

Mellie headbutted him in the shoulder. He realized that he was utterly unsurprised that she’d grown again. The girl who’d leapt into purgatory for him was still determined to keep him at arm’s length and in the dark, even as she buckled under the weight of her own heart. It wasn’t going to help their chances of getting her back out alive, he thought.

Well, he wasn’t going to let some dumb akuma they’d beaten before stop them now, even if it was the last thing he did.

Which, admittedly, it probably would be.

“Okay,” he said to Plagg. “Which way _now_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any and all guesses regarding which akuma Ladybug ran into will be met with the shrug emoticon ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ You will find out what happened and which akuma she encountered, just not yet. 
> 
> Kris didn’t beta this chapter so please forgive any of my mistakes (she is sick and also apparently has something called “a life,” which sounds fake but okay) BUT SHE MADE THIS STUNNING PHOTOSET AND I AM SO ENCHANTED WITH IT: http://therentyoupay.tumblr.com/post/141899930387/miraculous-ladybug-journey-to-the


	5. you are (not) alone

“And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.”

― **Naomi Novik** , _**Uprooted** _

 

 

“Well,” Plagg said, “it’s not like this is a frequent hobby of mine or like there’s some kind of ‘Bringing Your Chosen Back From the Dead for Dummies’ manual, but I’m pretty sure you have to go find his body.”

Chat started. Next to him, Ladybug stiffened.

“Isn’t my body...back in the world we just left?”

“Physically, yeah. But this place is a dark mirror in a lot of respects. You should be able to find a reflection of it here. This isn’t technically the underworld. It’s purgatory - the connecting world between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Didn’t you expect more _actual_ ghosts from the _actual_ afterlife? You have a spirit, and you have a body, and you have a third part of you that connects those two facets. That part is what you lost. That’s what you’ve got to get back. And it’s probably right where your body was. And is probably also more or less...a body.”

Which was just horribly, horribly weird. And didn’t really clarify how they were going to get back. And, of course, there was one glaring element that made Chat feel like he’d been skewered all over again. “So she didn’t need to come. If I just have to go find that piece of myself, all she should have done is opened up the gate _for_ me, and let me do this _alone_ \- ”

“ _No_ ,” said Plagg and Ladybug, at the same time, then looked at each other in surprise.

There was a brief moment of silence; Plagg broke it.

“This world is unbalanced,” he said, “because she’s here. There isn’t supposed to be anyone alive in this world, but there is, and the world...knows that, for lack of a better term. Normally the akuma are dormant. Not gone, but not...individual. They’re just a part of its energy. Now they’re awake because she represents an infection, so to speak. This world is going to try and kill her.”

 _“That sounds like exactly why she shouldn’t be here!”_ Chat exclaimed.

Plagg shook his head. “I wasn’t done. Usually this world only lets in the dead, and it’s a one-way door. They’re on their way to the next life, or the underworld, or whatever comes after. You would have wound up in here one way or the other, very shortly, portal or no portal. It would have pulled you in. But she’s alive and the world wants her out, and it can’t send her to the underworld unless it kills her first. But it also means that she’s the key to getting back to the living world. The door back there would open for living person, because the living world is where she belongs. If the door opened for the dead, everyone would want to come back. There’s a reason real ghosts are few and far between.”

Which brought the whole argument back to why he had hated it in the first place: he didn’t think it was worth her risking her life over, and she had apparently decided otherwise.

He was pretty sure the laws of nature would be on his side, but he was also pretty sure that wouldn’t have stopped her either.

“So how do we get her to a door?” He said, at the same time as she said, “so which way do we go to get back to the school?” 

He did his best to muster up a challenging look that would match the one she immediately leveled at him.

“We need to get you back home,” he said.

“What are you gonna do, _chaton_? It’s not like you can force me to leave without you.”

Which was when he remembered the beautiful, beautiful feeling of rocks falling on his head.

All he wanted to do in that instant was crow in triumph - _hey, about that!_ \- and leap forward and wrap her in a hug until they warmed up this whole empty purple world.

But he didn’t.

He was sure that there had been moments in the past when he hadn’t told her something rooted in uncertainty or embarrassment. And, of course, there was the Dark Cupid episode - how could he have confessed his feelings to her after he’d almost killed her? Normally, though, the idea of keeping secrets from her seemed half appalling, half ridiculous. This was someone he trusted with his life, when he’d had it to offer, on a regular basis; she’d never hesitated to do the same. He kept his identity from her, of course, but that was only ever based on _her_ wishes.

And so when his mind whispered _don’t tell her_ , it was as alien and unnatural as the world around them. It had the ominous ring of a recent mistake unlearned: he had just tried keeping his death from her minutes (hours? seconds? days?) ago, and it had failed spectacularly. But that had been rooted in fear, in avoidance. This was actively rooted in deception: if he could lure her close enough to a door back to the real world, he could push her through before she realized he wasn’t quite as insubstantial in this world as he’d been back in theirs.

He protected her. It was more than his job or his duty - it was what made him substantial after all, at least metaphorically, in his own mind. And if he had to lie by omission to do that, well, so be it.

He eyed Plagg. Plagg eyed him back, clearly needing no clarification whatsoever as to his intentions and the obvious reasoning behind keeping his mouth shut. The frequency with which the kwami seemed to know exactly what he was thinking was something that Chat wished he could accredit to some kind of spiritual bond rooted in the Miraculous. Plagg had assured him that no, Adrien was just a really predictable human being, even by the standards of someone who had five thousand years of history to compare him to and thus found everyone at least somewhat predictable.

Besides, he didn’t have his Miraculous anymore, and he couldn’t get it back from Ladybug without revealing his secret.

Plagg, for all his totally unhelpful helping in regard to the night-stone, stayed silent.

It made Chat uneasy. Plagg wasn’t normally one for playing his affiliations - or any reason behind them - close to his chest. He wasn’t naive enough to think that the kwami didn’t have secrets, but you generally knew where you stood with him.

Right now Chat could come up with only two plausible reasons that Plagg might have for pointedly not sharing. The first - that Plagg was actually inclined toward respecting Chat’s feelings in regard to keeping his current status quiet so that he could horribly betray his partner in an effort to protect her - didn’t seem like Plagg’s style. It wasn’t that Plagg was keen to respect Ladybug’s feelings instead, it was more that in general, respecting _anyone’s_ feelings was not something the kwami had any interest in whatsoever.

(Then again, as far as he knew, Plagg only ever talked to Adrien. Maybe he really did just not respect Adrien’s feelings. Which would definitely be annoying, but didn’t actually change the low probability of that as a possible explanation.)

The other possibility seemed much more plausible to Chat, and unfortunately much more sinister: that Plagg knew something, or had noticed something, or realized something, which made the original plan all the more dangerous - or maybe even actually, actively impossible. That saving Chat, or at least having the chance to, had been worth a near-insurmountable risk... but now the possibility was off the table and the only real course of action was to get Ladybug out, before she was lost too. Along with both Miraculous stones. Both kwamis.

Part of his mind knew that this was a deeply paranoid line of thought. The rest pointed out that, under the circumstances of the day, a heavy dose of paranoia wasn’t exactly out of line.

“Are you okay?” Ladybug asked, voice soft; he realized he’d gotten lost in his head. Again.

It should have been a stupid question given where they were, given that he was dead. But her voice grounded him. It always had. She’d always been determined to save everyone. Now she was determined to save him, so much so that she’d put everything she had and everything she was on the line. He didn’t think there was anything in the world that deserved so much, least of all him, but he had to try to be worthy of it. His love and respect for her demanded it, even if it was futile, even if he was still planning to betray her and snatch that chance away.

“Yeah,” he said, the same way he said it when an akuma threw him into a brick wall but he knew he could get back up, because he needed to get back up. Strained, but sure.

“Good,” she said - not unsympathetic, but on-with-the-mission. “Because we have to figure out where we are, and how to get back to the school from here. Gimme a sec.” The yo-yo came out, and she was flying to the roof of the nearest building, turning to look in every direction for landmarks to help her orient herself.

Chat stayed on the ground, chewing his lip and thinking. Mellie bumped her head against his side, smaller again. He and Ladybug were here, together. He wasn’t sure what would happen next and he was still doing his best to not let in an ounce of hope, but he and Ladybug together had never failed before.

(Of _course_ he’d died alone.)

“Plagg,” he said.

“Yeah?”

He probably couldn’t have looked up at the kwami if he’d tried, so he didn’t try. He focused on ruffling Mellie’s rubbery appendages, keeping his voice soft so as not to freak her out. “Don’t tell Ladybug who I am.”

Even if he wasn’t looking at Plagg, he could hear the little cat roll his eyes. “Yeah, her knowing that secret identity will really put you in serious danger, what with being already dead and in an alternate dimension. Back when it mattered you couldn’t wait to swap business cards. What gives? Why are there suddenly all these dumb secrets?”

“I don’t want her...to be disappointed in me.”

“And that never bothered you before?”

“Before, she couldn’t regret coming here. She couldn’t - what if she knows me, Adrien me, and thought Chat was someone better? The first thing she asked when she didn’t know who had died was whether they were a student at Collège Françoise Dupont. She _does_ go there. What if she finds out I’m Adrien and she’s trapped in purgatory regretting that she came here for me? She doesn’t...regret coming here for Chat. Let her keep that. She doesn’t have to know about Adrien until she’s home safe.”

Plagg looked as though he had further thoughts on the matter, but before he could open his mouth, Ladybug landed back beside them. Her face was grim.

“We’re on the wrong side of the city,” she said.

 

* * *

 

She was right.

He should have known that they would have gotten dropped as far from their goal as possible. He was actually a little surprised that they hadn’t wound up in Mexico. Maybe that should be counted as luck, but he wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to count his blessings today.

“Notre Dame is that way,” Ladybug pointed. “Once we get there, we can just follow the Seine. It will lead us to the Eiffel Tower, and school. It’s only eight or nine kilometers.”

“It’s further than we actually need to go,” Chat said. “We’d cut off at least a kilometer or two if we try to head straight to the Tower.”

“But it precludes us getting lost and losing time,” she countered. “Plus, if we get separated, we can always agree to meet at the last place on the river that we were together. It’s easy to remember, easy to find, and it means our rendezvous point will keep moving as we do.”

He couldn’t argue with that logic. His feline instincts made him more inclined to stick to small back streets rather than big open spaces next to the river, but his brain still knew that the plan made sense. And really, neither route would mean he could avoid what he really wanted to avoid, which was the Agreste mansion, since it was _right next door_ to the Eiffel tower.

_(don’t think about your father don’t think about your father don’t think about your father)_

He’d been doing a good job so far. He’d focused on the moment. He couldn’t slip up now. He had eternity to dwell on his relationship with his father, and what his death might or might not mean for the man. Right now, he had to focus on getting Ladybug back to the real world, without actually letting her know that was what he was doing. If he let his brain drift at all towards Gabriel, he knew without question he would fuck it up.

He just had to get through this last thing.

“Okay,” he said. “Lead the way.”

As always.

Always had never seemed so short.

 

* * *

 

He’d never really found any akuma to be as actively frightening as the empty streets of Paris.

The streets, actually, were not the problem. It was the buildings that lined them, the townhouses and shops and libraries, all a wreck, all shuttered and dark, all empty but maybe not. None of them appeared to present any kind of direct threat, but they were ominous all the same. He’d hated akuma before - mostly the ones that actually hurt Ladybug - and he’d feared what they could do, but he’d never looked at them and felt so utterly cold. He’d never felt like something deep under the earth had seeped into his bones and was wrapping shadowy fingers around his heart. He imagined that it was the energy of this place, unable to turn him into an actual akuma, letting him know that it could still affect him.

Or hey, maybe it was a ghost thing.

He could ask Ladybug if she felt it, but either answer was cause for concern. If she did, they had a bigger problem that they had no real way to actually deal with. If she didn’t, it was a ghost thing, and she would feel bad about it and still not have any real way to solve it. Plus she’d probably feel guilty, and sad, and it doubled the odds that he’d accidentally give away the fact that he had some measure of a corporeal form.

There was another question lurking in the back of his mind, though. He tried to toss it aside, but it kept bouncing back. It was hard to walk next to her, even if he carefully held himself apart, and not think about it.

“Why did you say no, before?”

She looked back at him, a small wrinkle appearing on her forehead as her eyebrows drew together under her mask. “What?”

She’d forgotten. It wasn’t surprising - she couldn’t know what that word had meant to him, the way she’d used it.

Part of him wanted to forget, too, or at least pretend to. It would be easier. But he’d learned since his mother’s disappearance that the window for truth was open only briefly, and once it closed the glass only became thicker and thicker, leaving whatever was on the other side more and more indistinguishable as time went on.

And so he did the harder thing, and asked.

“When we thought you didn’t need to be here for me to get back,” he said. “Before Plagg explained about the doorways. You didn’t want to leave.”

She looked almost offended. “Of course not.”

“Which is the wrong move!” He exclaimed. “Hawkmoth is still back in our world, and nobody’s there to stop him.”

“Hawkmoth won’t bother to attack anyone if we’re not there,” Ladybug pointed out. “It isn’t as if he can get our Miraculous stones with an akuma while we’re in another dimension.”

It was true. And not for the first time, Chat wondered exactly why Hawkmoth wanted them in the first place. What, exactly, did the man want to achieve with them?

What had he died for?

“Akuma aren’t all we fight, though,” he pointed out. “You’re vulnerable here in a way we both know I’m not. Tactics-wise, it didn’t make sense.”

She tilted her head, considering. “I suppose you’re right.”

Like that was it, like they were deciding which color shirt would bring out her eyes - but that it ultimately didn’t really matter, because she liked pink best and it wasn’t a big deal anyway.

“That’s it?”

“Well, what do you want me to say, Chat? Do you want me to wail and cry and whine about my choice? Because even if I did regret it, it isn’t as if I can change it now.”

There was no regret in her voice. But there was bitterness in it, a simmering resentment barely under the surface. It wasn’t directed at him, but the sound of it burned him all the same. Another thing she had to bear because he’d failed; another thing he knew without asking she would not give him an honest answer about.

Had they always been such liars in the face of one another? Had his death caused this, or just exposed it?

“You don’t regret it, though.” It came out of his mouth sounding like an accusation. He realized that it was. She was endangering the person he loved most in the world, and he was pissed off about it.

“No.”

“Why?”

“I suppose,” she said, calm and comfortable and bright bright red against the backdrop of black and grey and violet, “that I just didn’t want you to be alone.”

There was an abyss that yawned inside of him, his heart on a precipice above it.

He’d been alone for so long.

Nobody had ever _worried_ about it.

This girl barely knew him, really. He barely knew her. It wasn’t that their relationship wasn’t intimate regardless, or unimportant; they were, as far as he was aware, the only active two of their kind aside from the man trying to steal their power. But that very factor worked against them as well; it was rooted in circumstance. He knew all too well that each of them had been given a choice, had _made_ a choice...but up against a wall faced with Hawkmoth, how much of a choice had it really been? They hadn’t asked for their Miraculous. They hadn’t set out to be heroes. Someone - an adult someone, he was pretty sure - had put giant targets on the backs of two kids, and then...hoped that they had chosen right? Hoped it was worth it to said kids to keep their Miraculous stones out of the wrong hands?

Hoped that said kids didn’t just get themselves killed?

 _I sure showed you_ , Chat thought back out at the universe and whoever in it had signed him up for this.

But he couldn’t deny that he’d made a choice, too. And that choice had brought him to this girl, who had made the same choice. She might not be willing to tell him her name, but she also wasn’t willing to let him walk into the great beyond without her.

He still wanted to yell and scream and rage against the unfairness of it all, but he couldn’t bear to put the burden of that on her, to ascribe any of what was wrong with all of this to her. Loneliness was at the heart of everything that had ever really hurt him, and she was going to fight it for him any way she could and even any way that shouldn’t be possible.

What had he ever done to deserve that?

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The smile she gave him, small and soft, brushed away everything as if it didn’t mean anything at all. It said _what else did you expect me to do?_ It rang with her knowledge that he would have done the exact same thing.

Against the silence a _beep_ rang out, and the first spot on her earring disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I get to the identity reveal in time for Marichat May?? (probably not, at this rate. WHATEVER.) yadda yadda yadda tumblr: dragonsinparis.tumblr.com
> 
> Yeah, the chapter title is an Evangelion reference. If we're talking about the terribleness of powerful men obsessed with their dead/vanished wives in ways that profoundly neglect, isolate, and endanger their sons, Gendo Ikari kicks Gabriel Agreste's ass. 
> 
> By the way, I really appreciate all the lovely comments I get! You guys are sensational. The people who have been commenting as the story goes along particularly warm my heart, especially since it's been eons since I've written fanfic with any kind of regularity.


	6. love is a golden door

“Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.”

― **Connie Willis** , **_To Say Nothing of the Dog_ **

 

The beep seemed to rocket and reverberate off of every shadowed building that surrounded them. The silence had been so profound that the shattering of it seemed almost physical. Chat was sharply reminded of the instant of profound dread he’d felt when Jackady had commanded his father to jump off a roof: the abject terror that someone he loved who he had considered to be almost untouchable, almost invulnerable, was about to have their defenses stripped away.

Alya’s tiny cry of horror as Ladybug had pulled off his ring came back to him: the answer he’d always wanted was imminent, and all he wanted to do now was run from it.

She, of course, couldn’t run. Her timeline might have slowed down, but her luck couldn’t last them all the way back to the school. Even if it did, he wasn’t sure what they had to do once they’d found the body or how long it might take. He was going to find out who she really was after all, and suddenly the prospect was terrifying.

And if it didn’t work, his secret identity was just as short-lived. He trusted Nino, he even trusted Alya under the circumstances, but sooner or later if he and Ladybug weren’t back someone with authority was gonna come along and move the blanket. It wasn’t as if two fifteen-year-olds could override the cops just because Ladybug told them to; whether the cops even listened to him and Ladybug when they were _there_ was always a toss-up, and there had never been anything as dire as a corpse involved.

And it wasn’t as if he’d be hard to identify, given that his face was plastered all over Paris, given that it was at _his school_. It wasn’t as if everyone didn’t know who his father was; it wasn’t as if the school wouldn’t immediately have his contact information on hand.

_(don’t think about your father don’t think about your father don’t think about - )_

His father would be alone. Completely alone, now.

Not that that had ever seemed to bother Gabriel these last few years, but Adrien knew better than anyone what a difference losing his mother had made. His dad was cold and standoffish and it wasn’t like he hadn’t always been at least somewhat _reserved,_ but...when his mom had vanished, it was like all the humanity in Gabriel had been squeezed out like water from a sponge. The shape was recognizable, the texture mostly visibly the same, but the weight had changed entirely. Adrien had always hoped that eventually his dad would slowly, slowly get back what he’d lost, reabsorb his old self. It hadn’t happened yet, but Adrien hadn’t given up.

Nothing but losing his mother had ever hurt him like his father’s near-abandonment, but he also knew whatever was left of his father loved him. He knew that the minute his father discovered he was dead, the humanity and heart of Gabriel Agreste was a lost cause. Forever.

_( - don’t think about your father DON’T think about your father we have to get safe we have to get OUT of here - )_

Safe was such a silly concept when you were dead.

Ladybug was staring at him, her jaw slack with fear and realization. The beep had only sounded an instant ago, even if it felt like the time between then and now stretched and shrank as easily as a rubber band. He wasn’t sure whether she knew about her own time frame as Plagg had explained it to him earlier or if her expression was just because, even when he was dead, she didn’t want him to see her true face.

How could she make him feel so loved and so utterly alone at the _exact same time?_

“We - ” she swallowed and turned towards Notre Dame. “We have to go. We have to try.”

Unspoken, but implied: _we have to try and finish this before I detransform._

His throat swelled up with something that tasted like bile but which he knew was hypocrisy: even as he was terrified to learn her true identity, and even though he’d asked Plagg to keep his own a secret, he found himself cut to his core in the face of her distrust.

He wanted her to keep the protection that the transformation offered, but he wanted her to want him to know, in case they failed.

(They were _going_ to fail. He had somehow buried panic and settled on resignation, and it was hard to match her desire to rush when this whole thing felt like swimming against the current three centimeters from the top of a waterfall. You could try. That didn’t make the conclusion any less forgone.)

“Yeah,” he said, attempting unsuccessfully to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t asked Plagg to keep his identity a secret. It wasn’t as if his request wasn’t rooted as much in a sudden fear that she’d be disappointed as it was in keeping her safe. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t as terrified to finally see her true face as he was that she would no longer have a Miraculous protecting her. And yet, and yet, and yet: the distance burned.

How much less did it hurt to lose someone you didn’t truly know?

How much more did it hurt to be pushed away so that you could be more easily forgotten?

She looked like she wanted to say something to him, but she set her jaw and turned away.

There had always been moments, with her, where some part of her heart that he was not privy to took over, whoever she was without the mask came out, and he got to see the passion and the frustration and the confusion that lay beneath her steely gaze and confident demeanor. He loved her most in those moments, the ones where he could see through the transformation, where she was both girls at once. Even if she was wrong, even if she was frightened, even when she lost her temper - those cracks let her kindness shine through, too. The strength she’d built regardless of the magic stones in her ears.

There was something in the cracks now, but he wasn’t sure he recognized it and he wasn’t sure he could bear it if he did.

“We should - ” he started, and then broke off.

Mellie had grown again. He was fairly certain it wasn’t rooted in their fear, but that didn’t leave any particularly good options. She was agitated, too - walking circles around them, growling at the shadows.

Had the shadows been that long, before?

The world had started dark, true, but he was alarmed to realize it had suddenly gotten much darker. They were still in a wide square, but it seemed much more claustrophobic, as all dark things do: there was more room for monsters to hide and less room for him and Ladybug to retreat.

“Do you see - ” he started, before looking up to meet her grim gaze. She saw.

“Plagg?”

“Maybe let’s run,” the kwami said, sounding more uncertain than he had since they’d arrived.

“Head for Notre Dame,” Ladybug said, leaping off in what was presumably the direction of the river. He wasn’t sure the cathedral would offer any kind of respite or protection, hell maybe the goddamn gargoyles would come alive and try to eat them, but he didn’t have any better suggestions and if they were going to make a tactical retreat it might as well be in the direction they were planning to go anyway. It wasn’t as if it was any less safe than anything else, as far as they knew.

He ran after her. He focused on how the pavement felt under his boots, on the fact that he could feel it. He focused on Plagg, zipping along right over his right shoulder, harder and harder to distinguish in the darkness. He focused on Mellie, whose gait was almost rolling, who kept up far more easily than her small burly body should have allowed. He focused on Ladybug, running ahead of him as if she had any idea what she was doing.

His faith in her had never wavered before. He wasn’t sure it was wavering now, but he wished there was someone else here, someone older, someone who had seen a little more of the world and could maybe offer them some kind of reason or plan or -

It was funny to realize how much of his confidence as Chat came from the familiarity with his circumstances. No matter what they had faced, it was an akuma, it had come from Hawkmoth, and he knew how to beat it. He didn’t necessarily know what object had been cursed, but given that it was always something the akuma was wearing or carrying, there was a limited field of possibility that was easy to narrow down if you could last long enough. Defeating akuma was a system. And even if he didn’t know who Hawkmoth was, he was familiar enough with the motives of both the victims and their mastermind to know how to work the system.

Unfamiliarity was just as frightening as outright horror. This world was more than happy to show him both, and he wished there was someone who could tell him...anything that might help guide him. It felt overwhelming and impossible, that he was dead and still had all this uncertainty to face, that he still had so many important decisions to make. If he had to bear all of this, shouldn’t he get to be...done?

A weird thought broke in: _I wish Nathalie was here._ He’d long since given up on adult guidance beyond adult control, and yet...she almost came close, sometimes. She was the only adult to directly wish him a happy birthday; no matter how much he’d loved the scarf his father had bought, the human gesture was more palpable. She had fought for him to be allowed to go to school, and worked to give him the opportunity. She had risked her job - even after he’d endangered it - for something he’d wanted. She wasn’t his mom, she clearly didn’t want to be his mom, and yet -

\- he felt so young.

The idea of asking for help from his father, even in an abstract and impossible sort of way, seemed ridiculous. The Gorilla didn’t speak full sentences to him unless absolutely required to. But Nathalie would want to help, even if she couldn’t.

He knew his death would break his father. He knew it would turn the man to stone. But Nathalie, for all her aloofness, might actually be...sad about it.

Which was weirdly comforting and weirdly heartbreaking.

His mother wouldn’t know, even if she was still alive.

Would he see her soon, if she wasn’t?

He was starting to feel winded. Which was weird, but probably would have been weirder if he’d still been incorporeal. It was funny how much bigger the city seemed when he wasn’t being driven around it in a limo. It wasn’t like he didn’t have practice running after akuma, but they usually wound up pretty close by and once he found them the running mostly changed to acrobatics, which was way more his style.

As they rounded a corner onto a main road towards the Seine, however, he skidded to a startled stop.

“Look,” he said.

The darkness around them was all the more apparent against the brilliant glow that poured out from an alley half a block down. Chat felt as though the air was vibrating; he could almost-hear that silent ring that wasn’t really a sound where it felt as though there should be one. It was the contrast to everything else in this world, as much as the light itself, that made it so noticeable. It burst out of the darkness like a wound, the glow trickling into the darkness all around it, the shadows retreating as if they had been stung.

He raced to the alley and his heart started beating so fast it felt as though it was tripping over itself, stumbling, _soaring._ There in the alley, right in the middle surrounded by the open night air, was a golden door. Every inch of it radiated light and warmth and hope. He stepped towards it -

“Don’t bother,” Ladybug said from behind him. It wasn’t really a warning; it was the voice of someone who knew whatever he’d been about to try was pointless. It was a voice that utterly lacked curiosity or surprise, which of course could only mean one thing.

“You’ve already seen this,” he said.

“Yeah. Somewhere else, but the same thing. A little after I came through, but before I found you.”

“Do you know what it does?” He asked. “Where it leads?”

A pause. “Nothing. Nowhere.”

It was out before he could stop himself. “You’re _lying!_ ”   

The look she gave him was uncompromising, almost brutal. “No.” A lie, but not a lie.

He turned back to the door.

Ladybug was still behind him; she was standing pointedly far from it, and watching his reaction. There was no way he could surprise her enough to push her though, and even if he could, he wasn’t willing to risk throwing her what could be the _wrong_ door. He knew she was being evasive, but wasn’t entirely sure why, and she was too important to risk on uncertainty.

_But..._

Everyone always talked about the light you were supposed to see right after you died, the light you were supposed to go into or towards or whatever. Could this possibly be what they’d meant: a tiny door, barely taller than he was, hidden away in an alley surrounded by the rubble skeleton of his city? Was it some kind of purgatory-themed scavenger hunt? Was this whole ‘moving on’ thing really such a _chore_?

But did it matter now? If that was true, if he had found it...well, of course Ladybug would lie. She wanted to bring him back to life. And if that really was an option, sure, he’d prefer it to all work out, but…

...but Plagg had already as much as told them that it probably wouldn’t work, and if he did move on, Ladybug could focus on getting herself home without worrying about trying to find his ghost-corpse first. He wouldn’t be able to help her, but she still had his ring so Plagg would. 

He’d wanted to find a way to push her back to the real world. This wasn’t the quite as direct or effective, but wasn’t it _sort_ of the same thing? Take the choice out of her hands, make her go home whether she was ready to let him go or not?

He couldn’t look back at her. She would see it all over his face. If he was physical now, she could stop him. He couldn’t give her the chance. He couldn’t give her any warning.

He’d never learn whether or not he knew her behind the mask.

But if it kept her safe…

He leapt towards the door, into the light -

\- and was thrown violently backwards with a thunderclap, his whole body aching like he’d run headfirst into a wall and the wall had decided to hit back.

He lay prone for a moment, head ringing, gazing with confusion and vaguely horrified wonder at the darkening sky.

“Wow,” Plagg said, in between what sounded suspiciously like snickering.

“Told you so,” said Ladybug’s voice from somewhere above him, carefully neutral.

“You did,” Chat admitted, feeling like he should be more inclined towards meekness than he was. “You could have warned me about how fun it was, though.”

“I didn’t know that would happen,” she said. “I just knew it wouldn’t work. I didn’t actually try to go through the doorway.”

Unspoken: _I_ didn’t try to leave _you_ behind.

He had no reply to that, so he didn’t try to make one. The sense that he should feel more ashamed than he actually did remained, but he had made no secret of his own priorities in this place so he was pretty sure anything he might have tried would have come off as disingenuous. If his lady was gonna be pissed at him either way, he might as well be honest where he could afford to be.

(Plagg might have an opinion or two regarding that, so he was glad the kwami couldn’t actually read his mind. Plagg was now making a show of fake-napping on Ladybug’s shoulder, although whether to express boredom or disdain for Chat’s escape attempts, he wasn’t sure.)

He stood up, brushing off the dust that never seemed to stick to the suit in the real world. Ladybug was no longer looking at either him or the door, although he wasn’t sure whether it was actual avoidance or just her inclination to be as on guard as possible, especially in this place.

“We should get to Notre Dame,” she reminded him, and he realized that he’d forgotten where they were headed and why; the light from the door shone brightly and illuminated everything in their immediate vicinity, but everything outside its glow had continued to grow darker and darker and he’d forgotten they had a time limit.

They in fact had a multitude of time limits, only some of which they had any sense of - or any grasp of the consequences for.

She glanced at him, briefly - the first time she’d really looked at him since they’d come into the alley to find the door of light - and then turned away abruptly as if something had stung her, heading back to their agreed-upon path at top speed. He followed, somewhat contrite, still not quite as contrite as he should have been.

She was faster than he was over short distances, but he had better endurance. He wasn’t sure what impact his death might have on such things, but by the time she’d reached the river he’d caught up with her.

“Have you thought about taking the high road?” He asked, nodding a bit at the buildings. No matter how fast they ran, they’d always made far better time swinging through the sky and leaping from one rooftop to the next.

“I did,” she admitted. “But I started that way, when I was looking for you. At least half the rooftops are gone, and what’s left doesn’t always reliably hold much weight. I lost more time falling off stuff than I did just sticking to the streets. Birds-eye view made it worth it anyway when I was looking for you. But now that we’re together and we have a path to follow, I don’t think it’s our best bet.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed, remembering the wall that had collapsed on him and how fast the lamppost had fallen when he’d stood on it.

“Plus your new pet couldn’t come,” Plagg noted with some measure of scorn - although whether it was directed at him or Mellie, he wasn’t sure.

Mellie. How could he have asked about roof-hopping? She wouldn’t be able to follow.  

 _You’re going to have to leave her behind sooner or later,_ a voice in the back of his head whispered. _She belongs here and you don’t. Whether you go back or move on, you don’t get to keep her. Why do you always have to get so attached to whatever you can’t have?_

_How long was she alone before you got here? Will she always be alone once you leave?_

“Yeah,” was all he said, looking at the painfully ugly but utterly enthusiastic little monster that sat at his feet. Her blue tongue lolled out of her awkwardly smiling features like a dog’s would; he was less and less concerned that she might grow violent again and more and more concerned about what might happen to her if they wound up in another akuma fight.

_She’s not real. She’s made up of your fear. And you can tame that fear for a while, but that doesn’t mean it can’t turn on you. And when you’re gone, she’s gone too._

The slimy little monster had no connections other than the one she’d made with him half an hour ago and no sense of what a happy life would entail and the idea of her just vanishing once he was gone was still heartbreaking.

He didn’t want to have to leave her behind.

He didn’t want to have to leave _any -_

_( don’t go there don’t do that don’t think about it Ladybug needs you )_

_She’s here now,_ whispered what remained of his self-control. _They’re both here now. Hold onto that._ And he wanted to, but it was like trying to stay calm at the pinnacle of a roller coaster. He was already awash in fear: of inevitable failure, of the inevitable descent.

He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.   

He opened them, and looked down at Mellie. He focused on the most innocuous thing he could think of in an effort to calm down, and found himself counting the noodly appendages on her head. Turns out there were twenty-two. Definitely valuable information, he decided.

He looked up.

Ladybug was watching him carefully. Her eyes didn’t hold pity or fear; even in this place, they had fallen back into the habit of watching one another, measuring, operating as a team. She was making sure he was all right before she tried to move forward.

(Well, as all right as either of them could be in this place.)

“Are you ready?” She asked. _Are you okay?_

 _Not really. But since when has that ever meant I give up?_ “I’m ready.”

They jogged together along the river. They could already see the cathedral silhouetted against the sky, dark clouds nearly obscuring the moon behind it. They were both quiet, but the utter silence around them made every breath stand out and every step echo.

The shadows grew, one millimeter at a time. He never actually saw them move, but every time he glanced at anything but his destination he could see that they were longer, that everything was darker.   

He was fairly certain it wasn’t another akuma. Mellie hadn’t made anything darker.

What else could be in this place?

They turned onto the pont Louis Philippe, a wide bridge that took them over to Île Saint-Louis, then cut across the river again by way of the pont Saint-Louis. The first bridge actually made Chat feel safer; the buildings still haunted him, so being out over the water made him feel far less vulnerable. The bridge was wide enough for traffic, and was the most open and empty space he’d found in this dimension. Or whatever it was.

The smaller second bridge, however, made him feel as though his exits were limited: it was for pedestrians, and too narrow to safely dodge anything that might block his ability to get off of it. He knew that if he really was a cat, he’d prefer enclosed spaces, even with limited exits...but it turned out that whatever element of him was feline couldn’t overwhelm Adrien himself. He’d spent too long in spaces he couldn’t escape to find comfort in them. Even the cat in him was wary; on cold nights he often woke up panicked and panting, relieved not to find himself trapped in Lady WiFi’s freezer.  

They made it across the bridge, and found themselves staring up at the cathedral.

He loved Notre Dame, at least back in the real world, but it was because of the architecture rather than any religious affiliation. The only context he could use to think about that was his mother, which hurt like hell and felt like tempting fate. His life was shaped by magic in so many ways, but he’d never really thought much about what might exist beyond what he saw with his own eyes. He’d never let himself.

Well, before today. Today he was feeling pretty existential.

He didn’t really think that the cathedral held any answers, but it was familiar; it was one of his and Ladybug’s favorite spots. They knew the outside of it by heart, nearly as well as the Eiffel Tower. Sometimes he’d come as Adrien, too - those rare moments he had free and unsupervised - and pretend that she was also there in her civilian form, just around a pillar in the nave, gazing up at the dappled light of a stained-glass window. That like him, she went places which reminded her of their time together, even if they were still invisible to one another.   

God or no God, he was sure Notre Dame would feel safer than anything outside.

There were three portals on the front of Notre Dame, with two doors under each one. He tried the two on the right under the Portal of St. Anne - locked - and then crossed all the way to the left to try the two under the Portal of the Virgin. No dice. He glared at the middle two, unsure of whether he would rather they open or not, and what it might imply.

Ladybug had been watching him. “What’s with you, _chaton_?”

He pointed above the doors in the center, at the Portal of the Last Judgement.

She grimaced sympathetically, but stepped past him. The left of the two central doors - of course - slid easily, silently open under her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who is sick of looking at maps of Paris!! “But Abby, no one will care if you don’t use the name of the specific footbridge you want them to cross to Notre Dame” [looks into the camera like she’s on the office]
> 
> I know the rest of the world uses the metric system and as a teacher I think it’s idiotic that Americans don’t, it’s clearly a much better system, but it’s throwing off my word/syllable artistry here. I just wanna say inches, is that so bad?? 
> 
> You know what the chapter title is from. Don’t pretend you don’t. That movie has retreated slightly from its world takeover three years ago but it will be back and we all know it. Disney, like a horror movie villain, always comes back. Especially when dealing with something that profitable. Look, I didn’t have any better ideas and I wanted to post the damn thing, don’t judge me.
> 
> I know we’re all hyped about the news out of SDCC but ANYBODY GOING TO OTAKON?? I would love to say hi to other Miraculous fans.
> 
> As usual I am mostly on tumblr come say hi http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/


	7. interlude: (burning) portrait of the artist as a young man

_“Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.”_

― **Richard Siken**

 

The automated Paris News Alert on Nathalie’s phone informed her of the unconfirmed death of teen hero Chat Noir exactly fourteen seconds before the Gorilla parked the limo in front of the Agreste mansion and she realized it was on fire.

There was an instant of disconnect, where she stared at the smoke pouring out of the top floor windows and assumed that reality would reinstate itself momentarily.

Reality did not cooperate.

When it came to elements of business, there were few people better equipped than Nathalie to deal with a crisis. There was a reason that Gabriel Agreste relied so heavily and almost exclusively on her as his connection to his own company. His decision to widen her sphere of responsibility to include his child was far more questionable, but she could usually more or less cope.

This particular challenge did not fit the parameters of her job or her skill set. But Nathalie was never one to shrink from a crisis, so after the first wave of disbelief washed over her, she was out of the car.

She could see movement on the second floor, in the study. Nobody was allowed in there without Gabriel’s approval and presence. It had to be him.

“ _Call 112_!” She yelled at the Gorilla.

Of course he’d be in his fucking office as his house burned down around him. Until that goddamn painting caught fire, he might not even notice the flames.

The key code pad to get past the alarm and into the house was blinking with an aggressive error message. The fire must have fried the circuits. She plugged her password in twice, got nothing but a confused and tinny ‘beep’ each time, snarled in frustration and threw a potted plant through the living-room window.

(“INTRUDER” the keypad helpfully announced. She informed it that she planned to shove a motherboard up its non-existent ass as soon as she did the same to her employer. This had no visible impact on its opinion of the situation.)

She balled up her blazer to crush the glass shards around the edge of the window (calling the defective alarm every single name she usually reserved for hoarders and hippies) and managed to cut her hands climbing in anyway. No matter. She took the grand staircase two at a time; she couldn’t see the fire in the house but she could _hear_ it, and the smell of smoke was everywhere.

She was fairly certain that it had started in or near the office, which made the fact that Gabriel was still in there all the more completely fucking ridiculous.

She tried the knob; it had always needed a firm push, and the blood on her hands from the window made it slippery and sticky. She swore again, pulled her sleeves over her screaming palms, and twisted against the pain.

He was sitting at his goddamn desk by the window, looking out at the city. The curtains were on fire.

 _"We need to leave!”_ she yelled.

He did not appear to hear her.

Nathalie was not as a general rule the sort of person to be easily intimidated, but even after several years working for Gabriel she regularly found him intimidating. At present, she only found him irritating in the extreme. Especially since he’d clearly been in the room the whole time, and she was already coughing at the smoke while he was not.

She stalked to his chair. He gazed at her, impassive. Normally he’d be judgmental, or closed off, but right now in the face of imminent fiery death he just seemed aggressively neutral. His expression was so distant that she wondered if he’d even noticed the fire, but she was also pretty sure he’d caused it. And from the look on his face, he just didn’t give a damn.

She did not get paid enough for this.

“You can deal with whatever the hell is wrong with you later,” she snapped at him. “But right now you need to get up and we need to _get the hell out of here.”_

Nothing.

 _“Come on!”_ She reached down and did her best to yank him out of his chair by both hands. It was like trying to lead cement by the hand. He wasn’t heavy but he didn’t want to move, her hands were killing her, and she hadn’t had time to go to the gym more often than once every four or five weeks because she was always busy running his business or raising his kid.

And now she might burn to death trying to save him because he couldn’t be even the least bit proactive about that either.

“As soon as we’re not in mortal danger,” she said. “I quit.”

He stared at her, impassive.

“Just for the record,” she said.

He was clearly as neutral on that fact as he was on the burning curtains.

Nathalie contemplated leaving him behind. She’d tried to come get him; she’d tried to save him. He clearly didn’t want to be saved, and while she liked her job a lot (at least, the parts she’d actually been hired to perform: the whole parenting thing was kind of a stressful mixed bag) she wasn’t emotionally attached to her boss enough to give up her own life uselessly trying to convince him not to give up his. Whatever good person might or might not have once existed inside Gabriel Agreste had clearly checked out months ago. He was a genius and she admired his work but she had a great resume and she liked living and she could find other geniuses.

And yet: Adrien.

With a sigh she grabbed the fireplace poker and twisted it inside a burning curtain to make a makeshift torch. Looking him dead in the eyes, she set the painting of Gabriel Agreste’s missing wife ablaze.

His whole body twitched like he’d been stung by a bee, and he blinked up at her as if he’d finally noticed she was in the room. “ _What do you think you’re doing_?” He snapped at her.

“ _WHAT THE HELL ARE **YOU** DOING_??” she screamed back.

He seemed to lose all the familiar Gabriel scorn and indignation at once; he shrank back, confused, lost. She would have enjoyed the reaction - she’d never gotten it before - if everything hadn’t been on fire, and if it didn’t look dangerously like him possibly going back into waking coma mode. And, of course, if she’d thought she actually caused it. She’d woken him up, but it was something in his own head that was beating him down. He looked down at his hands, smeared with her blood, and gave another little jolt.

“If you do not get out of that chair and come with me out of the house right now,” Nathalie announced, somewhere between a cough and a growl, “when we die and go to hell, which may in fact be momentarily, I am going to sew your face to your own ass and call it couture.”

“It was my fault,” Gabriel told her, in an absent sort of way.

“I couldn’t care less what you think is your fault but your behavior right now isn’t exactly winning you any points,” she told him.

“I killed him,” he said. “I lost control, and she killed him.”

Well, that was bone-chilling but made no sense. “That statement has two murderers and no body and _have you noticed everything is on fire._ ”

“It’s my fault,” he said again.

“Can it be your fault _outside?_ ” she asked. He didn’t seem to be terribly inclined towards proactivity but he also was at least kind of awake, so she gave another yank at his hands and almost fell over backwards when it actually worked. She wasn’t about to let the window of opportunity close, so after some initial stumbling she slung his arm around her shoulders and used his momentum to drag him out of the room and down the stairs.

The fire department had arrived. They’d knocked down the door. The broken alarm appeared to be mad about it, if the beeping was anything to go by. Nathalie was worn too thin to care about anything beyond the fact that she wouldn’t have to haul Gabriel out the way she’d come in.

She stumble-ran them both out the door, and two firefighters immediately lifted him off of her. They were escorted to the back of an ambulance, where both of them were examined quickly and given oxygen masks. Gabriel had an NPA put into his nose first, which would have been funny under other circumstances or if he’d appeared to notice it.

“He could have cyanide or carbon monoxide poisoning,” one of the EMTs said, watching her watch her boss.

“I’m pretty sure this is just his inability to cope with shit,” Nathalie said. Now that she wasn’t in imminent danger it felt a little odd to curse; normally she was nothing if not professional. Then again, she had quit. She wasn’t entirely sure Gabriel would remember that, so she wasn’t sure it counted, but she decided it counted enough to swear unprofessionally under the circumstances.

The two EMTs looked at each other for a second before peering back at her. “Uh...we gotta take him to the hospital and check him out anyway,” the other EMT said. “You should come too. Your hands could still have glass in them.”

Stupendous. “Okay. Can you give me a minute with him?”

“As long as you both keep your oxygen masks on as much as possible.”

She nodded, and they walked around the van and out of sight.

“Gabriel,” she said.

Nothing.

“Say something!” she meant it to sound at least sort of concerned, but she was still more weirded out than worried. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that beyond the shock he almost looked guilty. That threw her as much as any of it. Nathalie had always known that something had broken in Gabriel when his wife vanished. But guilt wasn’t his style, even when it should be.

But then -

“The kid,” came a voice from behind her - sad, soft, defeated. “The kid’s dead.”

She turned. The Gorilla was behind her, utterly ashen. He looked as shellshocked as Gabriel. Which was kind of ironic, since shock had apparently destroyed Gabriel’s ability to complete sentences but given that power to the Gorilla.

“What kid?” she snapped, before realizing he was cradling her phone, open to the news alert. “Chat Noir? What the hell - was this an akuma? Did the fight happen here? Shouldn’t Ladybug have fixed it?”

“It was at the school,” the Gorilla said.

“Then what the hell,” Nathalie snarled, “does it have to do with the house being on fire?”

“Adrien,” said Gabriel - the one and only word he’d said since they’d made it out.

Like his declaration of homicide, it was ominous but didn’t make any sense. “They would have called me if anything happened to Adrien, not one of you,” Nathalie pointed out. “You made sure mine was the only number they had. And he’s famous, so wouldn’t they have mentioned it on the news along with Chat N- ”

Click.

_\- no no no no no no no no no -_

The weird disappearances. The mood swings. The ridiculous stories under the most implausible of circumstances. The fact that he’d been eating way more than even puberty should have necessitated but was somehow more fit than ever before. More than anything, the way he’d looked at Ladybug that day in the car as the hero had battled the Mime - _battled the Mime without Chat Noir at her side_ \- like Adrien had never looked at any girl in his life. They could all be attributed to teenagerhood, but the timing of each memory came crashing in, riding on a brutal wave rooted in the expressions of the two men in front of her.

They’d known. They’d both known.

It was easy, if a bit humiliating, to realize she’d underestimated the Gorilla. She’d assumed that he was stupid; Adrien was always right under his nose but she’d let herself believe that he wasn’t paying attention.  

But Gabriel?

Gabriel barely saw his son once a week. Chat Noir hadn’t appeared until this pattern was well-established. She knew the security feeds inside and out, while Gabriel rarely bothered with such things; if Chat Noir had been caught on tape she would have known sooner than he would.

She stared at him. He stared at the ground.

“Are you sure?” She asked.

He nodded.

“How?”

“The ring,” he croaked.

She’d noticed the ring, but she hadn’t thought anything of it beyond being impressed that the kid would wear something not from his father’s line. She’d chalked it up to Adrien engaging in a little bit of teenage rebellion without doing anything serious enough to jeopardize his time at public school.

_( - oh god that poor kid he was alone I wonder if he knew - )_

But if the ring really was a Miraculous, how had Gabriel recognized it as such? The monsters those kids battled were always going on about their jewelry, but no one had gotten a good enough photo to really be able to tell the detailing, and either way the magic clearly changed them when the transformation kicked in. So how could he know, unless…

It probably said something less than pleasant about Gabriel's demeanor even at its best, that it was so easy to picture him as the destructive, covetous force behind the attacks. That the pieces fell so easily, obviously together. That virtually every change she’d witnessed in Gabriel Agreste over the past year but couldn’t categorize as grief suddenly made so much sense.

The kid she cared about as much as she really cared about anyone was a dead superhero. Her boss and said kid’s father was a supervillain. And somehow, all she could think was _I can’t believe these two both figured it out before me._

“I still don’t understand,” she said. “People have been killed before. Ladybug brought them back.”

“He broke the akuma,” Gabriel said. “I tried to make Blackthorn take it from him, but he broke it before she could. Ladybug never used Lucky Charm during the battle. She can’t fix any of it. But she’s trying now. She used a nightstone.”

“What does that mean?” She asked. She felt like she was asking from far away. More and more, all she could think about was blond hair and hopeful green eyes. She could almost sympathize with Gabriel’s weird, dysfunctional distance. If it hadn’t been his fault, if he hadn’t killed -

Oh, God.

“She went to the Lower City,” Gabriel said. “To purgatory. To get him back.”

What had life been like before superheroes? Nathalie could barely remember. Reality had been a thing, right?

Behind them, the house still burned. That felt real.

“Maybe she’ll succeed,” she said. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the Gorilla, still cradling the phone. “She’s never failed before.”

“She doesn’t know the price. She doesn’t know what it will do to her to pay it.”

“What the hell do _you_ know about that place or its price?”

“You leave the best parts of yourself down there, no matter what happens.” Gabriel said. “Look at the version of me that came back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO I'M NOT DEAD unlike adrien 
> 
> I actually have most of the next chapter written but I'm not making any promises about when it goes up because I'm apparently very unrealistic about keeping them.
> 
> I also love writing Nathalie so I'm trying to figure out if I can write the rest of the story from her perspective. She's not actually in the underworld and knows nothing about what is going on so that would probably be a mistake AND YET (I'm kidding, but only mostly.)
> 
> The title is based on the James Joyce book. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Read fanfic instead, tbh. And yes, Nathalie's threat against the alarm IS a West Wing shout-out. I live in DC, I'm very stressed about politics, roll with it. 
> 
> Kris/therentyoupay beta-read this, she is the shining beacon of my heart etc etc


	8. are you there god? It’s me, adrien

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today in ‘abby doesn’t know what subtlety is, but she really likes dramatic irony’
> 
> ANYWAY happy holidays, here’s some characters feeling things, I made it just for u

“Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.”

― **Tana French** , _**The Likeness** _

 

The inside of Notre Dame was pristine.

He wasn’t sure why that wasn’t strange. It didn’t feel any safer than anywhere else; it wasn’t any more pure or any less ominous.

It just...looked exactly the same as it did in their world. It was old, worn, but untouched by destruction and very well cared for.   

Although back in their world it would never have been so empty.

The ultimate effect was almost more eerie than the broken city outside: being so close to familiar but not quite anything resembling normal set Chat’s teeth on edge. It was physically identical, but literal worlds away from the place where he’d always been able to hide away and find his peace of mind as Chat. There was no one in sight, but the candles were lit.

“Okay,” Ladybug said, soft and carefully neutral. “That’s different.”

He could hardly say she was wrong, and the whole scenario was undeniably creepy, and yet maybe the weirdest part was that he was just aggressively not surprised.

Was it rooted in something subconscious, or did you just find less and less weird stuff surprising when you were dead? He didn’t much like either option, but he felt like it was probably door number one. He’d been working pretty hard at that whole ‘repression’ thing, and he’d seen enough horror flicks to know ghosts got freaked out over everything. If your kind was known to go homicidal over boring white suburban families, you lost a lot of room to claim that you were ‘emotionally removed.’

And it wasn’t as if he - Ghost Exhibit A, and probably far more reliably accurate than whatever Hollywood was churning out - was having a particularly emotionally removed day, despite those efforts at repression.

“Little bit,” was all he replied with, which sounded weird but felt accurate.

The sound of another beep on Ladybug’s earrings against the silence was so jarring, when it came, that he almost didn’t recognize it. Both of them flinched at the sound, and avoided looking at each other.

They moved slowly down the nave. Their steps echoed. The silence was spooky, but he wasn’t sure what sound wouldn’t have been. Maybe dramatic organ music? That might have toned things down, merely through the cliche factor. Aside from Mellie, Plagg and each other, they were still alone in this place, this world. If - as Plagg had said - there were more akuma out there, he wanted to avoid them for as long as possible. He wanted to avoid them entirely if he could.  

And if there was anything else down here - something with, say, the power to darken the sky and reach out with the shadows - he definitely wanted to avoid that.

(He wasn’t sure it could do anything to him. But it wasn’t out of the question, since he wasn’t incorporeal anymore, and either way he wasn’t willing to risk it being able to do anything to _her._ )

“Do you think it’s because it’s a church?” He asked. He wasn’t religious, but he also wasn’t about to discount the obvious possibility.

“No,” Ladybug replied. “I passed the Sainte-Marguerite Church before I found you. It was a wreck. This isn’t some...demonstration of the validity of some particular faith.”

“Yeah,” Plagg noted dryly from by his right ear. “Especially for those of you who don’t have _a god sitting on your shoulder_ to confirm that maybe humans haven’t figured all their higher-plane shit out.”

There was always that. “Sorry,” Chat responded. “I don’t suppose, almighty deity, that you could solve this whole death thing some easier way?”

“I’m saving my strength for when the cathedral comes to life and uses the power of hell to undo all the terrible consequences of Victor Hugo’s negative perception of humanity, succeeds at overthrowing the local theological government, and fails to hook you up with your crush.”

“What?” Ladybug said.

“He’s talking about the Disney movie,” Chat sighed.

“I’m just saying,” Plagg said. “In the _book_ , Phoebus is a dick, Esmerelda gets executed, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame starves to death hugging her dead body in that joint where they threw all the other dead bodies. Suddenly that terrible guy from _Seinfeld_ gets involved as a gargoyle and everybody good lives? Power of hell. I can deal with akuma nonsense and purgatory and your weird new pet. I’m not putting up with _Seinfeld_.”

“That seems fair,” Ladybug said, her voice wry but the tiniest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

“Please don’t indulge him, he’s terrible enough as it is,” Chat said.

“You should enjoy it while you can,” Plagg retorted.

There was a deeply uncomfortable silence. Dread poked at the edges of his stomach, testing how ripe he was to break down. Ladybug was stone-faced. Plagg looked like he might regret having said it, but resented regretting it just as much. Chat felt his own resentment build. He wanted more than anything to break the silence, but refused to do so before the kwami did.

“Let’s go up to one of the towers,” Ladybug said, finally. “I want to be able to look outside.”

He went to pick up a candelabra, but remembered his secret just in time, and drew back. Let Ladybug think he’d forgotten he was incorporeal, instead of realizing he wasn’t.

She walked past him and picked it up.

As she stepped away, the world seemed almost to blink. She still held it, but the candelabra was also still where it had been. There were two candelabras now, leaving no empty space behind. But when he tried to focus on both at once, his skull felt tight.

“That’s...also different,” Ladybug said.

“Or aggressively the same,” Chat pointed out.

Ladybug glanced from one candelabra to the other. She had a light to carry, but Notre Dame apparently had a way it liked itself to be arranged and was not about to let little things like physics get in the way.

“Should I put it back?” She asked.

He shrugged. “I mean, unless there’s some kind of whacky Notre Dame Guardian we’re unaware of - ”

 _“Nobody deserves Seinfeld!”_ Plagg hissed again, aggressively.

“ - then I don’t think it’ll do any actual harm. It’s okay with us having a light, or you wouldn’t have been able to move it at all. It just...wants to be the same.”

“It _wants?_ ” Ladybug asked, and he shrugged again. It was easier than figuring out how to answer her question. He turned to a nearby stairwell that circled upwards into the dark; she followed him, and they climbed. The unsettling feeling in her voice was echoed in the pit of his stomach, but as far as eerie shit in this place went, it didn’t even rank top ten. It was creepy, but part of him was glad that he didn’t have to face Notre Dame in ruins. The idea of it…

_The idea of it._

He paused and turned back to her. “Plagg said that the reason I’m the ghost of Chat Noir instead of my civilian form is because I like myself better this way.” She opened her mouth and closed it, an emotion he couldn’t name raw in her eyes. It made him wonder: if she was a ghost, would she wear the mask? He wasn’t sure which answer he’d prefer; her other half was hidden from him, so he had no context for her happiness. “That the idea of it in my head kept me looking like this, gave me this form.”

She stared at him, blankly. “So…?”

“So maybe...it can’t apply to all of Paris. There’s too much of it that’s unfamiliar to almost everyone in the world. But maybe the really famous parts, like Notre Dame, are still okay because so many people know what they look like. This is how the world sees it. The parts of the city that are still here are held together in people’s minds. And that’s why you can’t change it.”

She looked down at the flickering lights on her candelabra, thoughtful. The wax, he noted, was not melting.

“Maybe,” she said. “I like that better than what I was thinking.”

“What were you thinking?”

She hesitated for a moment. “That this was the future. That it’s what would happen because I - because _we_ left. That the price of coming here was having to face what could happen if we failed. If we never came back.”

He noticed the slip. She still wasn’t looking at him, but he knew that she knew he noticed. A part of her had given up on his resurrection already, or had never really believed it was possible after all.  But that didn’t matter. How much had he ever believed it was possible? What mattered was that she’d come anyway, either because she wasn’t ready to let him go or she couldn’t not try.

He turned away and began climbing again, more to avoid letting her see his face than anything else. What did a potential apocalypse matter, in the face of such a revelation?

It was a long walk, and a quiet one. The stairwell was pitch dark outside of her candlelight; his night vision was still existent, he found, but somewhat questionable. But there was nothing to see but stairs and stone, so it didn’t really matter. Everything looked almost unnaturally yellow, though, and it took him a moment to realize it wasn’t just his mind playing tricks on him but the result of his eyes adjusting after he’d spent a bunch of time looking at everything bathed in shades of violet.

Her steps behind him were steady. They sounded like a heartbeat.

Eventually they reached the walkways and courtyard of the roof. It was so odd to come upon a place where he’d spent so much time from such a different direction; until he’d reached the familiar destination, he hadn’t realized that he’d never once taken the stairs up. The courtyard, despite being swathed in purple light, was as it had always been. The city beyond, despite the denial of everything about where they were that lay lurking in his heart, was still in ruins.

He ached with love for the city. What were the Heroes of Paris, without Paris? He wasn’t so self-important to think the city had died with him, or that - as Ladybug had feared - it had fallen into ruin without them. His heart broke for it, all the same.

They looked out for a few moments, together. He could see Mellie wandering, out of the corner of his eye; she seemed to be examining the statues, to see if any of them were unexpectedly alive.

He saw Ladybug begin to reach for his hand, then falter and fall away.

Oh, god, he was cracking.

“This is all Chloé’s fault,” she said softly, bitter and suddenly vicious.

That wasn’t what he’d expected. “Huh?”

“All of this!” She burst out. There were tears on her cheeks for the first time since...

...had he ever really seen her cry?

“The blonde girl,” she said, as if he didn’t know. They’d faced so many akuma who were strangers to them that it would have been silly to assume he knew every individual, but then again, Chloé certainly ranked high amongst potential causes. “She was Antibug. And she - she caused Vanisher, and Lady Wifi, and Kung Food, and Dark Cupid and - and then she hurt Rose’s feelings. Over some stupid play. Rose is a romantic and Chloé just can’t stand people liking things - and so she bullied Rose, and Rose became Blackthorn, and Blackthorn - ”

_\- killed you._

It would be so easy to blame Chloé. But it was impossible, too. He could have stopped her; he could have saved Rose. He was one of the few people Chloé ever actually listened to. And he hadn’t bothered, because...it had seemed like too much effort. Because having to try and mitigate Chloé’s behavior every day was a chore.

Such a small thing.

“It wasn’t her fault,” he said quietly.

“ _She caused it!_ If it hadn’t been for her, being cruel _again_ , for _no reason -_ ”

“She just doesn’t understand,” he said.

Despite the tears on her cheeks, Ladybug looked genuinely angry. “She doesn’t understand? What, that she’s being cruel? She knows perfectly well that’s what she’s doing! How many times can she send people running away in tears before she figures out she’s hurting feelings?”

He sighed.

Oh, Chloé.

“She knows, and I’m not saying she’s not responsible for her actions, she just don’t really...”

“Understand,” she drawled. “Yeah, you said that.”

“She doesn’t - her mom’s gone. And her dad’s a dick who spoils her.”

“Yeah, he gives her whatever she wants and fires anyone who looks at her funny or breathes too loud in her presence. It must be _so_ hard.”

“It’s why she is the way she is with her friend.” He wasn’t sure if Chat Noir had enough feasible context to know Sabrina’s name, but it wasn’t as if Ladybug wouldn’t know who he was talking about.

After all, it wasn’t as if Chloé had any other friends.

“Her dad - that’s what she learned, and where she learned it. You spoil people who give you what you want and you bully or boss around or punish people who don’t. Her dad spoiling her is as much about his own power trip and preserving his own image as it is about her. That’s always what love has been in her eyes. So that’s how she shows it. If she let herself believe love demanded loyalty or kindness or generosity she’d have to face the fact that she’s totally alone.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Ladybug said. “She sure treats me differently in and out of the mask.”

His heart fluttered - _she knows Chloé_ _! -_ but he stood firm. “Worship is different. The way she treats you as Ladybug still serves her own purpose.”

“Yeah, well, she’s still not alone,” Ladybug said. The words were bitten off, but the malice in them had sputtered out. She turned away from him, for the first time seeming to notice that she was crying and belatedly trying to keep him from noticing. “Vanisher isn’t her only friend. She has the perfect example of how to be a good person despite a missing mom and a shitty dad right there, every day. She’s got Adrien.”

His heart stuttered to a stop in his chest.

“Adrien?” He asked weakly.

“Adrien Agreste,” she said. The sound of his name from her lips was the whole cathedral wrapped up in two words; he had to focus to understand what came after it. “He’s her friend, despite everything. Her oldest friend. And he’s a good, kind person. To everyone. There’s nothing she’s suffered that he hasn’t.”

He felt light-headed, dizzy. He wasn’t sure whether it was euphoria or oncoming nausea. Either way, even after everything, even now that he was dead -

“Maybe Adrien has something good to hold on to,” he said, looking away, down, anywhere but at her. His brain was so busy trying to untangle the implications of her knowing his other side so well; it was proving to be an impossible task. “Maybe she doesn’t.”

Her voice was quiet, and muffled enough that he could tell she was still facing away from him. Even though the question was framed as an accusation, he could tell it was tinged in honest curiosity, and in a broken heart. “How can you defend her?”

“I’m not stupid. I know she’s a bully.” It was harder to admit than he wanted it to be, because he didn’t want it to be true. Holding on to the good in someone who had saved him when he needed it would be so much easier if she wasn’t vile to everyone else. He shrugged, then realized Ladybug couldn’t see it. “I guess I just don’t see the point in blaming her.”

“You’re dead.” It was the first time she’d actually said it. It sounded like she was speaking past bile. “At least in part because of her.”

“I’m dead,” he repeated. “But any akuma we’ve faced could have been the one who killed me. In the grand scheme of things, what does it matter who decided to be a jerk today, or which akuma got in a lucky shot? It’s hard to look out at all this and decide the person who caused _this_ akuma was evil but the _last_ person who did was just having a bad day.”

She turned back to him - cheeks wet, eyes bright. He was wearing her down, he could tell, but the enormity of the cost still loomed between them.

“I caused an akuma once,” he said, almost offhand.

She blinked at him.

He gave her a sheepish, tiny smile. He hadn’t admitted it before; it was so embarrassing at the time, and seemed so ridiculous now. “I never really told you. But Copycat - that was on me. Like, he was in love with you, but what sent him over the edge was me implying that he didn’t have a shot because you and I were dating. That’s why he took my form.”

“You dumb cat,” she said, all watery affection.

“I could have died that day, too. That’s the point. More than one person I love has caused an akuma, by accident. People are people, and people’s feelings get hurt. Sometimes there’s no way _not_ to hurt someone.”

She looked away again too quickly, and he was sure at first she was tying what he’d said to his obvious motivation for lying to Copycat. Until: “I caused one, too. I mean, I caused Antibug, of course. But I caused another one, too.”

“What?” He said. He racked his brain, and came up empty. They’d fought dozens of akuma, and plenty had been connected to her, but the actual cause? “I - ”

“I’m not telling you which one,” she said. “It was my civilian identity.”

This was torture.

It must have shown on his face, because she gave him a sympathetic smile. “My point, _minou,_ is that you make a compelling case. I can’t deny that I’ll keep resenting her for it, but I also know pretending you aren’t right, at least in part, has rarely served me well and won’t this time either.”

He smiled back at her, before looking out over the city again. It was harder to see the destruction from up here. The bridges were intact. The water of the Seine, undisturbed by wind or boat or anything living, lay flat and waveless like a mirror. Mellie was behind them, making some sort of delighted cooing noise at a stone cherub’s foot.

The prevalent darkness remained, although the violet moon still shone.

The darkness seemed less a living entity and more like a sudden shift, now. The darkness wasn’t hunting them; the world had just suddenly decided to have less light in it. He was afraid of what the darkness might mean, but then again, if the light represented the toxic aura of an akuma, was darkness inherently worse?

...did it really matter which was worse? Notre Dame felt safe, or at least safer than anywhere else down here, but he wasn’t sure it actually was and they were on a time limit either way. Her transformation was almost halfway gone and they hadn’t traveled a quarter of the distance they’d need to. On top of which, Chat suspected, once they did find whatever version of his corpse remained here it still wouldn’t come down to anything as simple as just lying down on top of his body and spiritually merging or whatever.

But despite everything here that conspired to make all of this impossible, to make everything hard and brutal and hopeless, he could at least look out at this city and know -

“This isn’t the future.”

She looked at him again. He wasn’t sure she believed him, but he could tell she was grateful regardless. “You seem pretty sure,” she said.

“I’m _paw_ -sative,” he retorted, with a little grin he was almost sure he actually meant.

“Why is that?” she asked, returning the smile.

“Because,” he said, “we left too many amazing people back there who would never let this happen.” The words felt like they spilled out before he’d even really thought of them, but he was relieved to find that he meant them all the same. It was as much catharsis as he was ever going to get from this place: to be able to offer her this comfort and know that it was true.

“Nobody like us. Nobody with powers.”

“You don’t need powers to be a hero,” he said. “I’ve known that for a while. Actually, you kind of taught me that too.”

“You don’t know me without powers,” she said.

“No, not that way. I meant - there was that one time you didn’t show up. Do you remember the Evillustrator?”

She nodded, too slowly to be natural. He wondered, briefly, what on earth she expected him to say that had her suddenly as frozen as the statues that stood above and around them. She’d always been so wary of sharing information, but after all...she’d been the one to give him the assignment in the first place.

“You had me protecting a girl named Marinette, because he - Evillustrator - was obsessed with her. His alter ego or whatever, the person under the akuma, had a crush on her. He wanted to take her on a date, so we set up a plan to try and get his cursed object while she distracted him.”

She blinked several times in a row, as if she didn’t already know all this.

“Anyway,” he said, “the truth is that she did most of the work. I’m not saying she didn’t need my help at all, but it was almost like...working with you, actually. Like nothing is as great as working with you, but she was so calm and cool and inventive and it made me see how even though we were chosen, there are people all around us - I mean, like, in that other world, where there are people - who could be heroes. Who will step up, even if we weren’t gonna make it back. Who know what’s right, and will fight for it. I actually know Marinette, and I guarantee she’d be one of them. She’d be first in line.”

He’d been trying to help, but for some reason she was crying again. They stood there on the roof of Notre Dame, awkwardly, her crying and him trying gamely not to fidget or panic at her reaction.

But when her tears did slow and she finally looked up at him, she was smiling.

“Are you...okay?” He asked tentatively.

“Yeah. I think so. I never thought of it that way, but the truth is I know plenty of could-be heroes, too.”

“So the world is in safe hands,” he said, giving her his best finger-guns.

“Good,” she said, and he heard the thank you that rang out beneath her words. “I’ve got big plans.”

“I don’t,” he said, and he was sure that when the words formed they’d had a smile in them but when he thought about what they meant they sank like stones. It was an uncomfortably physical feeling to have, like a sudden and unexpected drop; his own despair sneaking up so suddenly just as he’d quelled hers. He repeated himself; he knew they’d be just as true but somehow he needed to hear them again. It was like stepping on a broken leg for confirmation of its status - probably not healthy and definitely way more uncomfortable than he’d anticipated even though he was braced for it. “I...don’t.”

That was it. That was what had let him hold himself together all this time; that was what had staved off the shock and the breakdown.

He had never imagined his future. All he’d ever wanted to be was a person with friends, and then a superhero. He’d managed both, but he’d never let himself contemplate more. It had seemed like so much just to get that much. There had never been a dream to work for because he’d always assumed that he'd be his father’s son forever.

“What?” Ladybug said, the pitch of her voice rising in wary confusion. She could tell he was suddenly upset, but she wasn’t sure why.

And how could she know? She didn’t know who he was or what he did. She didn’t know who his father was or what that meant -

\- except she did know Adrien. She liked Adrien, from the sound of it. She knew him well enough to know what kind of person his dad was, what kind of relationship they had. This girl, whoever she was, knew poor dead Adrien well enough to mourn him. When she escaped back to the real world, she would recognize the body beneath the blanket. It would mean something to her. It would change her perception of both sides of him. And he knew now that she _cared_ about both sides of him. Whoever she was, she’d just lost two friends for the price of one. And the flimsy, flighty excuse he had for not telling her who he was crumbled beneath the weight of this dual tragedy even as he realized that he _still_ couldn’t bring himself to tell her. She was barely managing to carry the weight of his death through this place as it was.   

Whereas he could barely feel it, which was unexpectedly infuriating.

He suddenly couldn’t bear to be on the rooftop looking out over a city so pointedly empty. Paris had always had such beauty and such history and none of it mattered in this place. Paris was over here, and who even _cared_ what the reason was, and looking at it from a distance to soften the rubble and the horror was a lie.

He turned and leapt back down the stairwell, taking them three or four at a time. He could hear Ladybug shout and follow him, but he was too focused on the feeling of almost-falling to discern what she said.

He burst back into the nave, his own momentum almost tripping him. Ladybug and Mellie were hot on his heels; Plagg had followed, with a little more caution. The kwami floated a few feet away, watching him with wary eyes. He wanted to glare at the cat, scream at him, but the truth was Plagg was less to blame than anyone else in his life. If his life had mattered at all it was as Chat Noir, and he couldn’t have done that without Plagg.

He just wanted, so desperately, a reason to go back that had nothing to do with anyone but himself. He had his father, he had Ladybug, he had his friends, but he didn’t have anything that mattered to him on his own terms and only his own terms that he’d left behind or unfinished.

He gave a ragged scream, and pushed over a giant five-foot candelabra. There were dozens of lit candles atop it; they tumbled to the ground, spinning and rolling, a cascade of gentle light. And then Notre Dame shuddered every so slightly, just as it had when Ladybug had first picked up a far smaller one, and everything was as it had been. No candles on the floor, no toppled holder.

As if he wasn’t even there, as if what he’d done didn’t even matter.

He grabbed another candelabra - just as tall, but with only three candles atop it - and started wielding it like a weapon.

There was a statue of Mary behind him, the body of Christ on her lap and an angel on either side. The angels’ wings were his first target, slamming the poll into them over and over. Mary’s face was next, her nose breaking off and flying into the darkness of the aisle, her cheeks spider-webbing under his assault. And then finally the broken body of a god who hadn’t been able to save himself, either, but at least had had a mother to hold him at the end. It wasn’t fair. _It wasn’t fair._

Notre Dame shuddered. The angels still had wings. Mary’s face was smooth and clear. Jesus lay in her lap, dead and flawless. 

“ _WHAT ARE YOU DOING_?” Ladybug screamed at him, her voice edged in panic. He ignored her.

She reached out to grab his arm, to stop him, and her hand passed right through him just as it had back in the real world. He could touch everything in this world but the one thing that mattered, and any hope he had of actually saving her was gone.

He couldn’t help laughing, and he wanted to wince at the horror of the sound. “Don’t you get it? None of it _matters_ . It’s the _same_. No matter what I do, it’s all the same.”

Still gripping the iron pole in one hand he scaled the wall, soaring above the piers and pointed arches of the aisle, past the gallery and up to the clerestory where he leapt high, hung briefly in the air and smashed three of the beautiful stained glass windows with the candelabra like it was a baseball bat.

Gravity reinstated itself and he fell, feet-first; rainbow glass cascaded down around him, and then there was that almost-shudder in the air, and he landed on the smooth clean floor alone.

“Chat, what’s wrong with you?” Ladybug whispered.

Her earrings beeped again. Three spots gone. She didn’t even seem to notice.

“I know what’s wrong with him,” said a voice from the shadows.

Both of them froze.

“He feels like his future’s been stolen,” the voice continued. It was light and female, almost careless. “Worse, that it was never there at all. He thought he had one, you see, but he didn’t. When the opportunity came to seize that future, to recognize it for what it was, he realized it was as insubstantial as a cloud.”

Chat was suddenly conscious of his hands around the heavy metal bar - without his pole or Cataclysm, it was the closest thing he had to a weapon.

He turned, slowly, just as Ladybug did. Behind them stood three figures. The creatures were warped, stripped of whatever element of humanity had lingered in the real world, but unmistakably reflective of three familiar faces: Stormy Weather, Kung Food, and Gamer.

The smirk on Stormy Weather’s face might not have been a grimace, if she’d still had any of Aurora underneath. As it was, the twist of her lip was drawn in gleeful malice. “We can relate.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a weird-ass couple of months, my kittens. There have been easier times. As always, thank you for your patience. And thank you for all the AMAZING comments, I'mma go reply to all of the ones left on the last chapter today or tomorrow because I read them all multiple times and treasure the shit out of them. <3 <3 Frankly, you guys are what keep me writing this. (I am so easily distracted.)
> 
> Anyway, as per usual this was beta’d by Kris/therentyoupay. She is the best. I, on the other hand, am a weirdo who is mostly just sick of trying to figure out the interior layout of Notre Dame. I hope they leave soon. (I know technically I am in charge of when they leave, I am writing the story, but like...I shouldn't be in charge of things. So I hope they leave soon. So that I can go back to being sick of maps of Paris instead.)
> 
> For the record: the akuma Ladybug is referring to in the conversation on the tower is Gamer; I started this story before Volpina (and a few other episodes, including the obvious Princess Fragrance) aired, so that's where I'm putting it in the timeline. Sorry for any Lila fans who were hoping she'd show up!
> 
> come be distracted with me on tumblr: dragonsinparis.tumblr.com


	9. ghosts of future past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good Morning Kittens I know it’s been forever I’ve been super busy and also I!! Hate!! Fight!! Scenes!! And really that’s all I’ve got by way of excuses aside from like...life.
> 
> This was beta’d by the amazing Kris/therentyoupay, whose ‘trapped in an elevator’ fic you should be reading instead, tbh. Also, in the interests of giving credit where it’s due: the perpetual encouragement of Jess/Thunderpot, the recent comments of straightforwardly and ragequilt, and cheerleading from Lily on Discord are basically what made me finally get off my ass and power through this chapter. (Also the artists - Dire and Hchano and of course Jess in particular but also just this whole fandom full of delightful and wonderfully talented people - who keep me inspired.) 
> 
> And those are just the most recent, because while in terms of kudos/reaction/pageviews per chapter this is is decidedly not my most popular story, the comments I get for it tend to be my absolute favorite. You guys have kept me on this story when I might otherwise have gotten distracted and wandered away. I look at comments for this story specifically whenever I need a writing pick-me-up. The emotional reactions, the speculation, the pointing out of details I hoped people would catch...it means so much, and while I am often not sure I deserve it, I cannot thank you guys enough, whether you’ve stuck with it from the beginning or only discovered it recently.

“You dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?”

― **Isaac Marion** , **_Warm Bodies_ **

  
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Plagg’s words from barely an hour ago were suddenly blaring neon, too-late alarm bells.

_“That magic retains the imprint, to an extent, of the person it possessed, and the emotion that drove it. The Horrificator showed up because you were afraid, which is why I told you not to freak out. Any negative emotion you have, if it’s strong enough, will draw the attention of any akuma who was driven by the same emotion. Fear. Or jealousy, or pride, or rejection, or…”_

...or loss of a future; the fury and despair that came with having the future they wanted ripped from them.

He had trashed Notre Dame - or he’d tried - in a burst of agony when he’d let himself realize that there was nothing bright to come. That there was nothing left to come at all. That everything he’d worked for wasn’t actually going to matter. If he’d kept Ladybug safe he could have comforted himself with that, but he hadn’t.

And even aside from Ladybug, a part of him was so desperately bitter that he didn’t get to have anything of his own. That he’d worked so hard to please his father, he’d spent so long being the ideal child in the gilded golden cage, and none of it meant anything because he’d died before he’d ever really gotten out. Before he’d ever gotten to decide who he wanted Adrien Agreste to be when he wasn't hiding behind a black mask and cat ears. Any karma points he’d earned from doing his best to be everything his father wanted from him were never going to be cashed in. He’d done the work but he was never, ever going to reap the reward because of some dumb fluke.

Of _course_ it was Aurore and Max and Wang.

At the same time, of course, it wasn’t - these shadows were not built on top of the person who had shaped them. They were nothing but the shadow itself, the malice, the jealousy, the rage. But they did still bear that shape, and they were still driven by it: three people who had worked so very hard for a very specific future, and then had that future ripped away. By a fair vote, by a petty bully, by a talented classmate. But the why, the how, wasn’t really important.

The loss was.

He wasn’t sure he’d appreciated it, when he’d faced these three in the past. He wasn’t sure he’d really appreciated any of them, any of the akuma, any of the people who’d been drawn into Hawkmoth’s web. A part of him had known that they were victims, but he’d wondered how they could feel so broken or so angry that they’d be blind enough to accept the villain’s help. Now he was sure that his miraculous had protected him, that if it hadn’t he’d have been no stronger and no more willing to deny the akuma than any of them had been.

None of these realizations were going to help him now.

“I don’t suppose by ‘we can relate’ you mean ‘we’d be totally cool sitting down and having a civilized discussion about the fastest way back to life so My Lady and I can get out of your hair?’”

“Killing you is faster,” Gamer said.

“Joke’s on you,” he retorted. “I’m already dead.”

Stormy Weather pointed her umbrella at Ladybug, eyes never leaving his face. “She’s not.”

He growled low in his throat, all potential olive branches forgotten. “Try it.”

“Kind of hard to worry much about you,” Gamer said. “Since the fact that you’re dead means you lost a fight when it really counted, and she had to step in to try and save you. And it won’t work, but at least she didn’t _cause_ the problem.”

His gut clenched. Ladybug could die not just _for_ him but because he could have made a different choice. A better choice. He had no reply.

Ladybug, on the other hand, made a noise of utter disgust and threw her yoyo. It wrapped around the giant pizza sword that Kung Food held, and for a moment he was sure the akuma would be disarmed. But the sword became briefly soup - the soup he remembered so well, the soup which Chloe had tainted, the soup that was Wang Cheng’s pride and joy and downfall - and the cord came back to Ladybug, empty and wet. The sword reformed, solid, as soon as the string passed through it.

Ladybug cursed under her breath. Gamer smirked. Kung Food simply stared at her, impassive.

They were horrifying, and beautiful.

The realization twisted in his gut, bitter and distant.

Even back in the real world, the living world, Kung Food had been the most colorful of the three. There he’d worn an orange jumpsuit with a singular Chinese character printed in white over a red circle on the right breast; here that character had become a pattern all over the suit, in a language Chat didn’t recognize. It seemed to be melting like frosting on a cake under a hot summer sun. Even the yellow and red hair over his deep purple skin seemed to be struggling against physics, and Chat realized belatedly that the man’s features had been drawn on with what appeared to be some kind of sauce. Even as the akuma moved, though, it was clear that somewhere under what looked like a melting goop-like figure there was something strong and sure.

He suspected that it might be the black substance that fell away every time an akuma was purified, in solid true form. But what did such science mean in the face of this world, where physics clearly only applied when it wanted to?

Stormy Weather and Gamer hid no such possiblities under their suits; he realized that he could see through them, that their very nature demanded they be as intangible as he.

Gamer’s dark suit, so simple, was unchanged. But where the part of him that was Max would have shown through, Chat’s sharp eyes could pick up instead tiny lines of code, ones and zeros over and over, too tiny to notice and ever shifting. Each piece was so small that it was able to perfectly replicate the person it inspired, but it made Max - Gamer - look like a hologram, as if he was all made up of something someone else had created and typed into a screen, and that maintaining his form, his very existence, demanded effort. The code glowed slightly, as all things did in this place, with a pale violet light.

Now that he was looking, it was simple to see that Stormy Weather was all made up of clouds under her mask and her dress. Thunder lurked behind her voice; lightening glittered over her hair. She was insubstantial, she had to be, but somehow Chat found her the most unnerving.

She was almost, he realized, like a ghost.

( _Takes one to know one,_ he thought.)

He hesitated only a moment - two against three meant an unclear distribution of potential dance partners, but he and Ladybug had faced worse odds and come out ahead. But that had been when they were in a familiar place, and when they both knew the rules of the game. Back in the real world, their coordination depended on having a solid goal...and on being able to help one another.

But he was dead. He was a ghost. He could not catch her if she fell, literally or metaphorically.

He had known he was dead; it was hardly something he’d been able to forget for any given moment. But when he reached into his gut for that familiar feeling of synchrony that had always come with being Ladybug’s partner and found that it was missing, he felt as though a part of him had died - a part that he had always thought was above such silly things as mortality. He had no time to mourn it, but it pierced him all the same.

_You could let go_ , a voice in the back of his head whispered.

Something inside him clenched in horror. It was as if an enemy had found a crack in the back of his mind, snuck inside, and made itself comfortable in his bed.

_I’m not giving up when she needs me_ , he thought back at it, vicious and firm.

_If you found a way past this place_ , the voice countered, _past purgatory and into the great beyond, then you wouldn’t have to worry. She would go back. She’d know she couldn’t save you. Save her by giving up._     

_Bite my entire ass, tail and all,_ Chat thought back, and leapt at Stormy Weather for distraction as much as anything else.

In a wave of wind and deja-vu, she opened her umbrella in his general direction and sent him flying, just like she had on a sunny afternoon only a handful of months before, when he’d been alive and flirt-pun-threatening her while hanging off a fence.

He crashed through a huge column ( _tremble, reform_ went Notre Dame) and fell into a pile of rubble that promptly vanished from underneath him even as he felt it digging into his back. He was sure that it shouldn’t hurt this much if he was a ghost: there were no visible wounds, but he was a pile of sharp aches and the copper taste of blood rang between his lips. He groaned, tried to rise, blinking away the lights behind the lids of his eyes -

\- one light refused to vanish.

There, tucked in the side of the nave behind the columns, there was another glowing golden door. Or maybe it was the same door, following them around. There was no visible difference, aside from location. And it was clearly magic. Maybe magic doors could move. It didn’t really matter -

\- why was it here?

What was the _point_ , if he couldn’t go through it?

Did it have nothing to do with them at all?

It only occurred to him in that instant that Ladybug had never tried, which meant that it was possible she could go through, even if he couldn’t. She was still alive, after all. Different rules applied, and he had no reason to believe that wasn't true here.

The voice in the back of his head made - not a sound, exactly, but a pulse of told-you-so satisfaction.

But he couldn’t make her go. He couldn’t touch her. The wave of bitterness was back, all-consuming, even in the midst of everything.

She wouldn’t go through the door, of that he had no doubt. Not willingly, and not by any demonstration of force that his ghostly brain could conjure up. And the only thing he could do to change any of it would be to find a way to so thoroughly destroy any and all hope she had that there was no reason, no matter how much she cared about him, to stay.

But in this place, where emotions ripped themselves into demons, what kind of monster would such a loss of hope unleash?

What would it turn her into?

Could she become an akuma, once her transformation wore off?

A sharp crash and a sharp cry reminded him that the fight was not actually waiting for him to finish his existential crisis.

He dashed back to find Ladybug swinging close to the ceiling, dodging lightning bolts. Gamer had manifested his giant robot somehow, and was reaching out trying to grab her.

Kung Food was off to the side by a pillar, watching impassively.

“Do you guys, like, take turns?” Chat asked him.

Kung Food turned and looked at him. The half-melted face revealed nothing.

“A LITTLE MORE HELP AND A LITTLE LESS CHIT-CHAT,” Ladybug called down to him. He found himself almost relieved at the irritation at her voice.

And, of course, what made his cheeks strain into a smile against all odds - “What a glorious pun, my Lady.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, as he leapt at Stormy Weather once again. This time he saw her attack coming; in the contained walls of Notre Dame, he used the wind to his advantage, flipping in the air and bracing himself against the column she’d tried to throw him against before using the momentum to fly back towards her, swinging his baton into her stomach. He wasn’t sure she’d be solid enough for it to even work, but she flew backwards and toppled into a candelabra.  

That made Gamer the only direct threat, at least for the moment, but they definitely didn't have a giant robot to counter him here and it wasn't as if either of them could actually use their powers she had his ring, tucked away somewhere, and she had already used Lucky Charm to get them down here.

It felt so long ago. He wasn't sure it had even been two hours since he’d died.

Another beep rang out. Four spots down; only one left. He cursed his own inclination to think of her Lucky Charm as long ago, as if he’d made her time limit go faster by taking the time for granted.

He was so afraid of what would happen when it ran out. He could barely tell why anymore.

“Any ideas, My Lady?” he called up, shocked at how normal his voice sounded.

“I admit I am at a bit of a loss, _chaton_. But it isn’t as if we can purify them anyway - can we?”

It probably couldn’t hurt to try and it wasn’t as if he understood the magic behind the miraculous all that way, but he was fairly certain she was right. Cleansing the akuma back in the real world was like rinsing mud off your feet in the shower. Cleansing the akuma here, he suspected, would be like trying to do it when you were still stuck with no shoes in the middle of the jungle. Even if by some weird-ass miracle there was a shower in the jungle, you were just gonna immediately wind up with muddy feet all over again.

“Do they even have enchanted items? Or butterflies?” He was pretty sure he already knew the answer: that whatever coated or consumed an otherwise unremarkable human back in the real world was the only thing that any of the monsters here were made of, and there was nothing to purify back into a person. There was nothing good lurking underneath and no innocent to save.

Part of what he had always loved about being a hero was that aside from the shadow that was Hawkmoth, there was no true villain to destroy. There were only people to save. Albeit some of those people to save were trying to kill him in the meantime, but his victory still meant a happy ending for everyone involved. There was no one to truly hurt and no one to punish.

There was nothing to save in the clouds behind Stormy’s mask or in all the recesses of Gamer’s code. There was only malice and darkness and all the shadowed pieces that humanity, for all its sins, could not bring itself to keep.

Stormy Weather’s closed umbrella came down in front of him, her arms on either side of his head, and yanked him over backwards by his neck. Apparently clouds didn’t stay unconscious for long.

_This is why you should never leave a fight unresolved,_ he thought to himself. _Bad things happen. Cumulonimbus Clowns try to strangle you even after you're already dead._

He brought his hands up to wrestle with the umbrella, although he had no idea what he’d do with it if he got it. Did the magic only work for her? Getting the weapon away from the akuma would probably help regardless, but he was sure there were some fables where only a demon’s own weapon could actually destroy the demon itself.

He lost sight of Gamer and Ladybug as they fell behind a pillar. He managed to twist his body enough to face Stormy Weather; her superior smirk was gone, and she was gritting her teeth in angry concentration.

He could, however, still see Kung Food. Mellie was sitting next to him. The two akuma regarded one another with companionable distrust but some measure of understanding.

He wrenched the umbrella away from Stormy Weather and opened it; he wasn’t expecting anything in particular, so he was only moderately disappointed when he couldn’t summon a gale to blow his enemies to smithereens. Instead, just as he had with the metal candelabra, he braced it like a baseball bat and took a swing.

The akuma, despite being mostly visibly intangible, went flying. He knew it wouldn’t keep her busy long, but for now, the _big_ problem - so to speak, or pun, or whatever - was still Gamer.

He burst back into the nave and felt everything spin and focus with dizzy horror.

Gamer’s giant robot towered over Ladybug, ready to crush her. His heart exploded with such terror that he could only see the spot of red, too far away. She’d come for him, she hadn’t wanted to let him be alone, he’d thrown a temper tantrum as if it would do any good and he’d summoned monsters and now she would die because of it.

Mellie’s slimy appendages brushed against the curved ceiling of Notre Dame as she suddenly shot up to the size of a townhouse. She had almost no room to move at that size, but it didn’t matter - her arms shot out, grabbed Gamer’s head, and crushed it as easily as if it were a paper lantern. The robot exploded into a shower of purple sparks that drifted lower and faded before they hit the ground.

“Mellie!” he cried, jubilant. “You’re the best! We’ll never have any trouble with any of the aku - ”

Mellie promptly shrunk to the size of a flowerpot.

_What?_

“Her size reflects your fear,” Plagg reminded him, in the same vaguely derogatory and bored tone of voice that the cat used to remind him not to walk into walls when Ladybug was nearby. Which had only happened like twice, for the record, but Plagg was never gonna let him freakin’ forget it. “So when you’re scared Ladybug’s gonna die, she’s huge. When you think she’s gonna solve all your problems, she fits in a shoebox.”

Which was impossible to control, he realized, because he couldn’t make himself afraid if the whole purpose was to create something that would prevent him from having to be afraid.

On the other hand, he wasn’t about to not be grateful. _One down._

“You’re the best little slime monster in the world, Mellie,” he cooed.

“Gross,” said Plagg.

“Mellie isn’t gross!” Chat retorted.

“I meant you,” said Plagg.

_Splat-wumph_ , went the pineapple hitting Chat in the face and knocking him over backwards. He flipped back to his feet in an instant, shaking chunks and sticky juice out of his hair, full of righteous indignation.

“PINEAPPLES ARE A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF WELCOME _HOW DARE YOU_ ,” he shouted at Kung Food, who had apparently decided to join the fight. “SERIOUS PARTY FOUL. INAPPROPRIATE FRUIT USAGE. MY SLIME MONSTER AND I WERE HAVING A _MOMENT._ ”

Kung Food did not seem bothered by the fact that his pineapple had killed the mood, which in Chat’s opinion was an enormous demonstration of egregiously bad manners. In fact, the akuma’s expression had not changed at all, except perhaps to melt a little more. He proceeded to send dozens of pineapples flying at Chat, who had no idea where the hell the akuma was even _getting_ them.

Chat ducked behind a pillar in an attempt to sort out his options.

But Ladybug was up again, and back in the action. “I’ve got a plan!” she announced, landing beside him.

He adored Ladybug, but he also knew her - he had always been sure that he saw her in a way that was distinctly different from her adoring crowds. She was human, and familiar. But his gut gave a jolt of adulation and relief, and he was sure that sense of faith was how any given helpless victim felt when she arrived on the scene to save the day. “I’m all ears.”

“I think Kung Food’s weapon is just a part of him. Whatever he’s made of, he’s holding that shape, but I think it’s...not necessarily in control of the shape, but making it fit whatever it needs. It needs a weapon but I think it’s part of the akuma. And when I hit it before, it became liquid.”

And for all that he’d doubted their duality in the face of his demise, he knew exactly what she was going to say next - and that, as much as anything, made him feel as if his faith in her was justified. He was still dead, but they were still them. That was important. That _had_ to be important.

“There’s a paten at the end of the nave,” she said. “Can you get to it?”

“Absolutely, My Lady,” he said with a smile. “Anything for you.”

He dashed back into the nave, and immediately had to duck another pineapple. He raced for a pillar and clambered up it, ‘running’ on all fours and with every exception to physics he’d ever been able to wrangle. He sped along the Cathedral thirty or forty feet off the ground, sideways, pretending he felt the wind the way he always used to. He could hear the windows shattering above him as Kung Food continued to send anything heavy his way; he could see the glass raining around him, even if the cathedral shuddered every few seconds to repair itself. He made it to the far end, flipped off the wall, and landed behind the table where the supplies for mass were laid out as if anyone in this place was in a position to embrace organized religion.

The paten - the plate for the bread, the body of Christ - was laid out along with everything else, and he snatched it up. He’d never been religious, but he muttered a whispered an awkward apology, just in case: this was definitely the sort of thing that would have caused a PR circus at home, and even if he was sure it was the right call and nothing holy was in this cesspit of a dimension or whatever, better to show respect where you could. Even if you were the only one who really knew.

All the way down the nave, on the other side of Kung Food, Ladybug stepped out from behind the pillar and hurled her yoyo at the akuma. It wrapped around him and, like it had when she’d tried to steal his weapon at the beginning of the fight, slid right through.

He was liquid.

Chat leapt forward, paten held sideways, and used it to scatter as much liquid as he could. It flew everywhere, a single spray of color before the rest of the akuma re-solidified with a large cavernous dent in its side that did not appear to actually impede it at all. The paten wasn’t big enough to do serious damage in one go.

“This might take a while,” Chat called up.

“Maybe go for the head next time,” Ladybug suggested.

He was fairly certain that wouldn't work very well - the akuma only seemed to have any given body part for decorative purposes - but he was game to try anything.

Which was, of course, the moment that Stormy Weather came back.

_“You mangy stupid ugly treacherous heathen stray!”_ she roared, her voice bouncing thunder off the walls of the cathedral.

“We’re kind of in the middle of an experiment here,” Chat said apologetically. “Would you mind coming back in like - ” he glanced briefly at Kung Food’s imposing, sturdy-melty form, “- four hours? Although if you wanted to wait, like, two months, that would also work for us. We will meet you right here.”

“No,” Ladybug cut in, eyes glowing, “she’s _perfect._ ”

And, just like he always had, he knew what she meant in an instant.

Ladybug threw her yoyo at Kung Food; Chat dove towards him. Kung Food became liquid again just as Stormy Weather aimed her umbrella at Chat and the gale descended.

Chat hadn’t been entirely sure how much he’d pissed her off until the wind hit them. The doors behind them blew open, and they tumbled and rolled back out into the night.

The gale followed, the glittering lightning-clad source riding its wind. She did not appear to notice that her almost-tornado had blown her temporarily liquid companion all away, that what remained of him splatted against the doors and the walls and the ground outside before fading into the same sparks that Gamer had been. He did not matter to her. All that had ever mattered to her had been her own ambition, and in this place, purging anyone who did not belong was all ambition had to offer.

Of course, the other two had not been quite so angry about it.

Max and Wang had only ever been sad. He had seen both of their respective downfalls, and even as victims, they’d been hurt by their loss far more than they’d been angry. He wondered if Aurore had been different. He barely remembered the contest - although he knew he’d voted for Mireille because she shared a name with an anime assassin he liked - but she, no doubt, found it far less forgettable.

Aurore had had her future all laid out. She'd always known what she wanted, and she would accept no alternatives. His father was like that, too. He had always thought people like that were strong, were driven, were destined for greatness -

\- but not being able to stray off her own path or change her mind or adapt to disappointment had been the reason Aurore fell victim to an akuma in the first place. It had almost destroyed her. She'd placed all her value in this one thing, this one moment. And he didn't know if she'd blamed herself or blamed Mireille or blamed the voters - it wasn't as if he and Ladybug were there for the akuma victims afterward, it wasn't as if they did post-possession exit interviews - but in the end it didn't matter who she blamed. What mattered was that failure had always been a possibility, and she'd never braced for it. The price of putting herself out there was risking rejection, and she'd been unwilling to pay.

The price of being a superhero was far steeper. And yet he remembered falling, bloody and broken with Rose underneath him, and feeling at peace.

It was worth it. He had never doubted it was worth it.

And he could resent the price all he wanted, but he had to remember that he’d always known what it might be, and he’d always _known_ that it was worth it.

Being Chat Noir had given him Plagg. Having a kwami had always been a bit surreal, and he was always a bit uncertain as to which elements of himself he should or should not be embarrassed about. He’d been so utterly lonely for the last few years that having a constant companion - even if that companion was rude and selfish and apparently prone to stealing jewelry - had been almost as amazing as being Chat Noir, almost as amazing as Ladybug. It wasn’t school that had made him _not alone anymore_ , not officially - it had been Plagg.

Being Chat Noir had given him Ladybug. And he loved her; he’d learned to love her when he’d thought in the face of his mother’s disappearance that love was a zero-sum game. Ladybug wasn’t a replacement, but she didn’t need to be. He didn’t want a replacement; he wanted an inspiration and Ladybug had given it to him. She’d taught him that even in the face of incredible loss and pain and confusion that he could still, _would_ still, find light and goodness and warmth. She was the world being worth surviving, she was what drove him to take each step - not because she was beautiful or kind or clever, although she was, but because she’d taught him that there was so much of all of those things out in the world.   

And being Chat Noir had given him Chat Noir. It had let him be a version of himself he’d always wanted to be; it had let him explore all the pieces of himself that Adrien Agreste had to keep tucked away. He loved Chat in a way he couldn’t quite bring himself to love Adrien, not because Adrien was wrong but because he sometimes did not feel as if Adrien belonged to him.

What price could he claim was too steep for those things? Certainly not mortality.

If he’d stayed, if he’d lived, maybe he would have had a brighter future. But he had had all of this, and Aurore was so focused on the only future she could accept that she didn't have anything _except_ the future.

He looked up to meet the akuma’s eyes and realized they were almost gone; the clouds behind her mask had melted away, and her costume was fading with them. His loss had brought her to them, but she could not sustain her wrath in the face of his acceptance, not even in this place.

He smiled at her. It seemed like the only thing to do. “I hope you have better than this, someday,” he said.

Her expression was blank. “Time has no allies,” she said. “It hunts you from places you can never touch. It stalks you from moments you’ll never see and moments you were born too late for.”

She was gone.

“What do you suppose _that_ means?” Chat asked.

“Who can fathom the mind of a weird akuma-monster who defeated herself,” Ladybug replied. He was sure he heard something lurking behind her voice, something that hinted she wasn’t as ignorant as he was, but for some reason now her secrets were easier to bear. He was keeping them too, after all. Each was rooted in how much he cared about her, and he had no reason to doubt that the motivation behind her secrets was any different.

“There’s another glowing door in the cathedral,” he said.

“Not gonna happen, _chaton_ ,” she said. There was a smile in her voice: she shared his suspicion about the nature of the doors but she was not going to abandon him.

And as worried as he was about her, she’d never lost before. He had made a choice, and he’d known the potential consequences. So had she. He told himself that he had to respect that.

And so when the final beep rang out against the silence, it actually took him a minute to remember to be afraid. He felt as if every organ was tumbling down into his feet, rendering him unable to move and utterly empty.

_\- no no no no no no no -_

Not that he wasn’t already empty. He was a ghost, his real body was gone, and now she’d be helpless.   

He turned to her, hoping against hope that there was some last-minute miracle that could hold her transformation, but even before he saw her fully he could see the glow of her magic falling away. The wave of pink sparks was jarring against the violet shadows of the world around them.

When they cleared, the person standing before him was - _of course, of course, of course_ \- Marinette Dupain-Cheng.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy marichat may!!
> 
>  
> 
> look it's monday idk what you expected
> 
> feel free to tell me what an ass I am on tumblr @ [dragonsinparis](http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/)


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